National Review writer thinks Americans ‘should be proud’ of waterboarding

November 8, 2007

It’s been a discouraging autumn when it comes to the right and torture. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page argued that waterboarding doesn’t necessarily constitute “cruel, inhuman or degrading” treatment of U.S. detainees. The National Review’s Rich Lowry suggested, in Matt Yglesias’ words, that torture is “a defining value of the American conservative movement.” Republican “strategist” Rachel Marsden said on CNN, “One man’s torture is another man’s CIA-sponsored swim lesson.”

But to show just how depraved some segments of the right have become, consider the latest piece from Deroy Murdock, a contributing editor to the National Review. While some conservatives have defended torture by waterboarding as a necessary evil in a ticking-time-bomb scenario, Murdock went much further, arguing, “Waterboarding is something of which every American should be proud.”

Though clearly uncomfortable, waterboarding loosens lips without causing permanent physical injuries (and unlikely even temporary ones). If terrorists suffer long-term nightmares about waterboarding, better that than more Americans crying themselves to sleep after their loved ones have been shredded by bombs or baked in skyscrapers.

In short, there is nothing “repugnant” about waterboarding.

Remember, this isn’t some random crazy person ranting on a street corner; this is a published column in one of the nation’s biggest conservative political magazines.

For what it’s worth, Media Matters did some fact-checking, and found that Murdock — surprise, surprise — doesn’t know what he’s talking about: “[A]ccording to medical experts on the effect of torture, waterboarding results in both short and long-term negative consequences for mental and physical health, including possible risk of death”

But stepping back and considering the big picture, one question emerges: what is wrong with these people? How, exactly, did we get to a point in which conservatives brag about their support for medieval torture techniques?

Rosa Brooks makes a compelling argument that so many conservatives have become so twisted that support for torture has replaced opposition to abortion as a litmus-test issue.

Today, though, the GOP’s interest in abortion appears greatly diminished. When President Bush nominated Michael B. Mukasey as attorney general, no one seemed clear about Mukasey’s views on abortion — and no one in the GOP seemed to care very much either.

These days, you can forget that old-style GOP rhetoric about “values,” “human dignity” and the “culture of life.” Because the GOP has a new litmus test for its nominees: Will you or will you not protect U.S. officials who order the torture of prisoners?

Kevin Drum wonders how conservatives went so wrong, so quickly.

The trajectory of this debate has been depressing beyond words. As recently as a year or two ago, conservatives seemed at least occasionally defensive about the whole thing, mostly limiting their defense of torture to ticking time bomb scenarios and the like. It wasn’t pretty, but it was at least a tacit admission that torture was shameful enough to be considered only in extremis.

But no more. The party that used to take Darkness at Noon as practically an ur-text about the evils of communism is now home to a snarling pack of presidential candidates who fall all over themselves to defend torture and abusive interrogation as a routine practice. How did we get here?

Andrew Sullivan notes a similar trajectory.

Have you noticed that the pro-torture right has gone from saying that torture is abhorrent to saying that torture isn’t occurring to saying that torture is not torture to now saying that torture is “something of which every American should be proud”.

That is the state of our discourse, and it’s getting worse. The arc is simply horrifying: We don’t torture … we did torture, but those were a few bad apples … we do torture, but only in life-threatening crises … torture is morally sound, so quit your bellyaching.

We’re dealing with a conservative movement that has largely given up on morals, standards, the rule of law, and even self-interest. One wonders what it will take to bring them back, and how long that might take.

“But stepping back and considering the big picture, one question emerges: what is wrong with these people? How, exactly, did we get to a point in which conservatives brag about their support for medieval torture techniques?”

It just emphasizes the point that more and more people are making that the current conservative movement is literally a mental disease, churning out unbalanced minds who know longer even recognize where their sanity, not to mention their humanity, went off the rails.

Somehow we’ve got to figure out how to turn off the never-ending spigot of dollars that keep these crazies in the public eye. Unless they’re stopped, we’re well on the way to becoming another Pakistan. And that’s no joke.

  • Murdock went much further, arguing, “Waterboarding is something of which every American should be proud.”

    Most Americans are proud of having completed their middle school, high school, and any ensuing education and personal development they’ve attained. Murdock, on the other hand, has apparently stopped paying attention to much besides baseball/football camp, and Playboy magazine, since turning 10 years old.

  • How many years is the over/under on when Lowry writes an article saying Americans should be proud of their new “Forced Abortions for Poor Minorities” program? I’m sure when push comes to shove keeping non-whites from breeding is more important to him than saving the wee ones.

  • This is what Dick Cheney spoke of long ago when he mentioned our middle eastern adventure in colonialism would require “stomach.” Stomach meaning we had the resolve to inhibit our natural desire to vomit at immoral excesses perpetrated to achieve dubious political goals. To borrow a line from an old hip-hop song, we’re as nasty as we want to be.

    But while conservatives congratulate themselves because somehow shredding our moral standards qualifies as “growing a pair,” this will bite us in the ass in the long run as we turn playing dirty into an acceptable norm. Blame conservatives, blame the media, blame whomever, but in the end we are the generation that let this nation regress into something that previous generations of Americans from the Revolutionary War on certainly wouldn’t have considered worthy of dying for.

  • The party that used to take Darkness at Noon as practically an ur-text about the evils of communism is now home to a snarling pack of presidential candidates who fall all over themselves to defend torture and abusive interrogation as a routine practice.

    Except for Ron Paul, I might add. And I know that I’ll be waterboarded later for mentioning that.

  • Here, I suspect, is the way to find out whether there is any hope for the silent masses in this country any more (and I usually argue this about the death penalty, but the principle – or lack thereof – is largely the same):

    if waterboarding is so innocuous, so useful, so great, lets just televise it when we do it. why do it in secret in Guantanamo? heck, put it on in the family hour so our kids grow up proud of their country, too! its never to early to see patriotism in action. we can have contests – lucky contestants can bet on who talks first, or how long it takes. the publicity will be a better deterrent than mere private torture. if waterboarding doesn’t get us answers, we can electrocute their genitalia, beat them with a nightstick, have dogs go at them, whatever – all on live television!

    one of two things will happen: the ratings will be immense and advertisers will be in heaven, as the public cheers for more (in which case this country is a lost cause anyway) or the public will finally rise up and revolt.

  • Any liberty minded American who embraces torture as a doable thing is operating with a medieval mind. -Kevo

  • i think alot of this deep psychosis and love of torture is also sexually arousing to conservatives. vanity fair had a recent article about the introduction of torture into current interrogation practices. two mormons — not so lovingly referred to as the ‘mormon mafia’ by other intel operatives — were highly responsible for the techniques used. then, there’s the mittster promising to double the size of gitmo.

    these are depraved and morally debauched people. on a staggering level.

  • WASHINGTON, DC:– The Republican National Committee, working with the editors of the Wall Street Journal, have decided to fund a summer camp for their members’ kids where the kids can learn first-hand that waterboarding and other interrogation techniques currently used by the U.S. Government and its agents aren’t really torture. Children of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page staff will have special scholarship available to them.

    Located in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Camp Torquemada for Boys And Girls will feature such activities as Waterboarding, Sleep Deprivation, Cold Room Sleepouts and for advanced campers, eye-gouging, bone drilling, mock-and-real firing squads and fingernail pulling.

    “Each of these activities will help these young campers develop a useful skill set,” said Reinhard Heidrich, the new summer camp’s head counselor. “Waterboarding, for example, is useful for improving underwater swimming skills. Those who have their fingernails yanked out will learn not to bite them.”

    The camp features a first rate staff from top to bottom, said Heidrich. “Dr. Josef Mengele, for example, will be responsible for the kids’ medical care during the summer.”

    Tuition will be paid by means of contributions to the Americans Proud Of Torture PAC, whose charter calls upon it to instill Americans with pride for this nation’s dungeons and concentration camps wherever in the world they may be.

    And yours very crankily,
    The New York Crank

  • What’s happening to the American Conservative movement reminds me in a way about the debate over Atlanta’s water woes. One of the solutions proposed for dealing with Atlanta’s water problems is desalinization. In this process, boiling it and having the steam travel through a tube to condense in pure form in another container procure fresh water. The remainder of the salt water is poisonous brine that can really not be effectively disposed of in large volumes. Over the last 7 years or so, many who have considered themselves conservative have been pushed through the tube to a new container and discovered that maybe they are not the same as those left behind. Those left behind, such as David Frum and Deroy Murdock, are simply the poisonous brine that was left behind. They cannot be easily disposed of, yet they pose a great danger to the population in general due to their toxicity.

  • Well, it hasn’t shocked our collective conscience yet for what we’ve done to Iraq and the Iraqis, has it? In fact, it’s pretty much accepted that all this carnage will have been worth it if Iraq eventually becomes a western friendly democracy (read capitalistic, so American companies get their hands on the oil profits).

    So, what’s a little torture of a few hundred guys, most of whom are probably bad guys?

    I mean really. Nobody gives a damn about 100,000 Iraqis slaughtered, hundreds of thousands injured and maimed (isn’t that torture?), millions put out of work, millions displaced, an infrastructure lying in ruins, and terror, terror, terror 24/7 for millions of others afraid to walk the streets.

    So what’s a little waterboarding compared to that?

    ‘Nuff said.

  • I probably say “What is wrong with these people” four or five times a day. And I still have no answers. I have this feeling that they think it’s somehow patriotic, that it shows how much they really care about America that they would go to any lengths to protect it from the evildoers. And I think they believe that to rule out torture as a tool is to leave us vulnerable to further attack. I think they don’t see possible terrorists as actual humans, as people who have any right to any dignity or humane treatment, so it doesn’t matter how we treat them.

    They seem happy to assume that anyone we night have in our custody is actually a terrorist. They would have to make that assumption because we are not affording the detainees with any means to prove otherwise. It is the antithesis of “innocent until proven guilty;” in the America these torture proponents live in, guilt is always assumed.

    That they are so willing to set aside all the principles that define America exposes a grossly fundametal flaw in their thinking, and renders them – in my mind – without any level of credibility on any issue of American policy or practice. While they have a right to their opinions, they don’t deserve the megaphone of national media exposure.

    They never see these things from the other side. They never consider what a policy of torture means for our people who end up in foreign custody. They never consider how that power can be turned inward and perpetrated upon our own citizens.

    I don’t understand why it is so impossible for these things to be part of the thought process, and I suspect that the idea of torture might actually be a sick turn-on for some of them.

    One thing I do know: no one who thinks it’s okay to torture should have one word to say about the “culture of life.”

  • “We’re dealing with a conservative movement that has largely given up on morals, standards, the rule of law, and even self-interest. One wonders what it will take to bring them back, and how long that might take.”

    I think that they may have gone so far around the bend that they aren’t coming back. Ever. Remember the Whigs?

    Perhaps this will lead to a new American political alignment. The Republicans will be a fringe party, selling endless war, fear, paranoia, torture, and theocracy. Traditional conservatives will find a home in the realigned Democratic party; the Democratic “centerists” already have a lot in common with traditional conservatives.

    And a new Progressive party will form from, as Howard Dean put it, “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.”

  • The right wing used to scream about “defining deviancy down”, until they realized there was an opportunity to be had.

    The devolving standard on torture is just the most disgusting example of how they have, by taking incrementally more out-there positions, moved the standard of ‘normal’ discourse into the absurd and the macabre.

  • Okie –
    Perhaps this will lead to a new American political alignment. The Republicans will be a fringe party, selling endless war, fear, paranoia, torture, and theocracy. Traditional conservatives will find a home in the realigned Democratic party; the Democratic “centerists” already have a lot in common with traditional conservatives.

    More likely the “Conservative Party” will retain power in 2008, much as they did in 2006. Sure the letters next to the names may shift a little, but the coalition of conservative Dems and Republicans will probably keep power.

    The first step is to get a Dem majority, but that’s not going to solve much beyond moving the reigns from the extremists to the conservatives. The next step is to re-define the Democratic Party as a progressive party – by actively targetting conservative Dems one or two per house per election until the remainder shift progressive just to keep their jobs or there are enough progressives to take the leadership away from the conservatives.

    Don’t count on the Republican “brand” being tarnished too badly either – they’ll make a comeback.

  • The insanity spreads. There is always that 10% of sick deranged beings who attempt to justify their own insanity as a good thing, hiding among us. Nothing of his claim is true and yet he makes them anyway. Waterboarding has never gotten us any useable information that could not have been obtained by other means…The world has heard the mob cries like “off with their head”, “hang ’em”, but never would I have ever believed that America would be boasting about torturing people.

    Anyone not seeing this as insanity is deeply disturbed. That the Review would even publish such trash demonstrates their desire to spread the insanity. These are the same ones who laugh at executions. They are truly pathetic human beings and not part of the public majority. A moral embarrassment held in contempt by rational people.

  • I’ll be turning sixty this coming April. Crap like this sometimes makes me wish that I was turning ninety.

  • We’re dealing with a conservative movement that has largely given up on morals, standards, the rule of law, and even self-interest. When did they have any of these qualities besides self intrest?

  • Its bitterly ironic that many of those on the right believe in moral absolutism about abortion and homosexuals, but when it comes to torture, its all “grey and relative.” They attack “moral relativism” except when they engage in it themselves…

  • They say watching violence on television makes children more violent. Unfortunately some of us just never grow up.

  • What is particularly troubling is the rapid rush to the right (far, far, right) by the looneytunes has created a high vacuum and has sucked weak-minded Dim-Dems further right behind them. What used to be the center is now the radical left. The real radical left dropped dead a long time ago, and there seems to be no end to the spectrum on the right. It just keeps on going, and going into a world, or a void, not even George Orwell, Adolph Hitler, or Joseph Stalin could have imagined.

    It has been said of Nazi Germany that it suffered from a national psychosis. Perhaps France under Robespiere did the same. Now it seems to be our turn. It took 50 years for Germany to recover, and it still hasn’t entirely. France got Napoleon. What will we get? Guiliani?

    The mentally ill frequently never recover, but improve with medication, sedation, electro-shock, confinement, or a lobotamy. I recommend all five to cure American so-called ‘conservatives.’ They are rudderless, and for their own good, not to mention the good of everyone else, have to be controlled.

  • “what is wrong with these people?”

    One small piece of the puzzle is that there really are a lot of bed-wetting, pants-pooping people in this country who really do fear the ‘muslim hoards that are on our borders and ready to take over when the right moment strikes.’ These folks are always afraid of the fear du jour. And as such they are very maleable and brainwashable and willing to do anything or give up anything just for the ‘feeling’ or ‘appearance’ of safety. Thus, there are lots of folks who are able and willing, for the right price (which may not even be that much with the current group of hucksters), to take advantage of these folks. Murdock is one–don’t know if he falls in the former group or the latter group, though.

  • Anne says: They never see these things from the other side. They never consider what a policy of torture means for our people who end up in foreign custody. They never consider how that power can be turned inward and perpetrated upon our own citizens.

    I think they do, and they savor how that would quiet certain elements of our society, the ones who make them feel stupid. I am fairly sure that a lot of the wingnuts would approve of using the threat of it to make the progressives STFU. And the ones who don’t approve of that will stay silent like the good Americans they are.

  • Has this “National Review” morphed into the “National Socialist (Nazi) Review?”

    Some seventy years later, this is as bad as the German Nazis and the Japanese Imperial Army in World War II: this is the 21st century, for God’s sake, what are this moral idiots thinking (and I use the term loosely)?

    Also, Bush has set human rights back some eight hundred years with his destruction of Habeas Corpus, which has been one of our prime pillars against government tyranny..

  • Sadly, Racer, I think you’re right – maybe what I should have said is that they never consider that it could be used against them – because for sure they always see themselves as being in the right, and could find it useful against those who keep reminding them about all those pesky Consitutional principles.

  • I have a pro-torture friend who’s dad was a POW in a Japanese concentration camp in WWII, and to this day, my friend will not buy anything Japanese. As an example, he said they made his dad stand for hours… which, I believe, is called “stress positions”. His dad wrote about his experiences, and it’s amazing how his entire existence has become this one episode — all the other years of his life have seeped away, and all he can talk about is what happened in that camp. It had that much of an impact on him, and as he grows old, it seems the most defining moment becomes the most vivid.

    But, Abu Ghraib, my friend says, is a fraternity prank.

    Let’s put aside the banana up the ass, the broken teeth, the dead bodies on ice, and streaks left by dragging the body through the pool of blood that covered the floor of his cell. Let us, instead, look at the water boarding, electrocution and stress positions, the most minor of the abuses, and therefore, the only ones acknowledged — it is the memories of that which most haunts his dad.

    And there is a passage in his book I never tire of reminding my friend about. When the camp is liberated, the prisoners are given the opportunity to do whatever they liked to the people who abused them for so long. Not a one of them took them up on the offer. As he said, “We were Americans. We didn’t do stuff like that.”

    Well, yes, we do. As Americans, there’s not a damn thing in this world so foul and immoral that a conservative could say we shouldn’t do, if we label it part of the WOT, no matter whether it works or not.

    So where is it, if not our morality, that our moral authority derives? It’s all authority, not a moral to be found.

  • I’d just like to point out that no one has ever died (AFAIK) from having bamboo shoved up their fingernails (or as Dershowitz would suggest, sterile needles). So it this acceptable now? It doesn’t lead to organ failure or permanent disability or even a near death experience.

    These people are really sick fucks, and I include Dershowitz in the mix.

  • As I’ve been following it, the apologists for torture would want us to believe we have three new friends – Nazi Germany, Soviet Afghanistan, and the NVR of the 60s and early 70s. What sick, twisted relative morality these folks on the right here in America have put on display for all to see! -Kevo

  • Anne said: “Sadly, Racer, I think you’re right – maybe what I should have said is that they never consider that it could be used against them…”

    I think I’ve mentioned this on this blog before, but I had exactly such a conversation with my conservative father when we started rounding up and interrogating random people because they were ‘furrin’. I said, “How would you feel if they started rounding up Ukrainians after a Ukrainian terrorist attack?” (we’re of Ukrainian descent), and he smiled this sad, little smile and denied that such a thing could ever happen.

    “Waterboarding is something of which every American should be proud.”

    I’m waiting until, after getting Reagan on the $10 bill, conservatives start petitioning to put this image in place of the stars on the U.S. flag…

  • Here’s something the torture-fetish crowd never seem to ask.

    What does torture do to us as a country?

    Do you have freedom, democracy, and liberty when you can be tortured, even if the threat is supposedly minute? The fact torture is being used in my country is frankly divisive – especially when the wingnuts keep calling liberals traitors – are they saying we deserve to be tortured? Are we next?

    What is it like to have a “torturer class” of people? What’s it like to have deliberately dehumanized people?

    What does it say to the world? Sure, the wingnuts like to act like they’ll somehow scare and cow the world by waterboarding some poor guy turned over to the Americans for a bounty by people that didn’t like him. But the fact is people tend to react to such things by getting viciously and vengefully angry.

    I dread what happens when the lid is really blown off of our treatment of prisoners – how safe will it be for an American to travel abroad, I wonder? How many more terrorists will we create? What mercy would be shown to America in a crisis – say a pandemic flu or large natural disaster?

    What it comes down to is they enjoy the idea of hurting helpless people to vent their frustrations. They’re the political equivalent of Jeffrey Dhamer.

    And look what it’s done to the country.

  • I’ve posted it many, many times, but if it fits …

    These people are becoming the very thing they are trying to destroy. And they are too blind by their hatred, fear and ideology to see it.

    It truly is sad …

  • hmmm. i don’t see this story on any major media sites. i keep looking for that headline “Leading Conservative Publication Says Americans Should be ‘Proud’ of Waterboarding.” maybe i’m just overlooking it; surely such a development is newsworthy and would be of use to the public. if anyone sees it let me know. thanks.

  • Under normal circumstances, a wild animal found to be infected with rabies would be put down on the spot, because the longer that animal is allowed to roam free in the wilderness, the more opportunities there are the disease to spread.

    Today, we have an entire group of rabid animals to deal with—the Bush Administration and its talking-head support system. Because they are allowed to continue to roam free, their disease—their “rabies”—is beginning to spread, to manifest itself as the acceptable norm. The expanding argument that waterboarding is morally acceptable denotes the fact that this administration is guilty of committing such crimes—and “Madame Speaker” Pelosi has taken “putting down on the spot” off the table.

    Thus, the disease continues to spread….

  • A research center at the University of California at Davis, called the Center for Human Rights in the Americas, has extensive documentation about what’s been going on at Guantanamo, including testimonials by prisoners and others who have been there. There is other information on their website as well, such as the neurobiology of torture, which makes for some unsettling reading but which is sadly par for the course in US policy these days. The website is:

    http://humanrights.ucdavis.edu/

  • Jeez. You’ve got to wonder why none of these folks are lining up to be waterboarded themselves, just to demonstrate to us skeptics how safe and humane it is.

  • related fake news –

    President Bush came to the defense of his embattled nominee for the post of Director of Military Detainees. The nominee, General Hucksby, has come under fire from Democrats for ambiguous answers regarding a form of interrogation known as fingernail-pulling.

    General Hucksby refused to say whether this practice constituted torture, as he had not been briefed on the subject. Several Democratic Senators said that they would have difficulty confirming a nominee who did not recognize torture when he sees it.

    In his news conference today, President Bush excoriated the Democrats for ignoring national security in the midst of a war on terror and instead focusing on extending the federal government into health care for poor children. He pointed out the gross unfairness in asking General Hucksby to decide whether fingernail-pulling is torture, saying, “because, you see, the use of this technique is classified”.

    homer http://www.altara.blogspot.com

  • “We’re dealing with a conservative movement that has largely given up on morals, standards, the rule of law, and even self-interest. One wonders what it will take to bring them back, and how long that might take.”

    When you are sliding down the hill of stupidity… only the rocks at the bottom will stop their ride.

  • Thank you for witnessing against torture and against apologists for torture. These attitudes of “it’s alright” are so repugnant that they leave many of us speechless with outrage!

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