I Don’t Like Waterboarding

[digg-reddit-me]Jonah Goldberg at the National Review believes that the debate over American torture is “stinks of political opportunism.” He apparently missed the point made by Morris David, the chief prosecutor for the military commissions in Guantanamo this weekend in the Times. And he apparently doesn’t care to take into account the fact that torture often produces false evidence. But he does have this to say:

I don’t like waterboarding, and I hope we never use it again. I have respect for those who believe it should be banned in all circumstances. But I do not weep that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed spent somewhere between .03 and .06 seconds feeling like he was drowning for every person he allegedly helped murder on 9/11.

Then again, I think it would be horrific if we used that logic to justify waterboarding. It’s not a technique that should be used for punishment. Nor do I think that evidence obtained from forced confessions should be used in trial. Those are paving stones on the road to a torture state.

Reading this, I guess that Mr. Goldberg and me have more in common than meets the eye. But what Mr. Goldberg doesn’t acknowledge here is that whether or not “coerced interrogations” will be used as evidence is still an open question in the upcoming trials of the “Guantanamo Six”. More important, he doesn’t deal with the executive acceptances of torture – from redefining it to mean only “pain equivalent to death or major organ failure” as John Yoo did while advising President Bush, to the many less dramatic instances where evidence of torture was “lost” or destroyed, as lower level employees were blamed for following vague directives to “take off the gloves”.

I think many sympathize with Mr. Goldberg’s formulation – of not caring for torture, but not caring about the fates of these mass murderers.

What Mr. Goldberg doesn’t seem to get is that he is not just apathetic about the torture of men who likely deserve it – he is also giving the President of the United States, an individual in a position of extreme power, a license to break the law when subservience to the law is the only thing that separates a President from a King.

If the President believes he or she must break the law in order to save lives, and judges that breaking the law is the only course available – then he or she should do so. But upon breaking the law, they must then submit to it. For if an individual is able to break the law with impunity, the entire system breaks down.