We learn now that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the apparent mastermind of 9/11, was waterboarded 183 times. Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 35 times. And I can 't help but wonder why we continue to think these acts were interrogation techniques. Perhaps there are rare situations where a) a person has such important information; b) that person is so resistant to providing the information; and c) exigency is sufficiently high that a country might decide to abandon widely accepted values to protect thousands, or millions, of citizens. Perhaps. But if waterboarding really works in these situations, wouldn't you expect it to work quickly? Is there really data out there - or even something that feels more reliable than random chance - that a regimen of 35 or 183 immersions via waterboard is likely to produce useful information that would be unavailable on fewer tries? (I hate to think of the regime that could conduct such empirical research. And now, it appears, we have become one.)
What makes more sense is that some folks involved in interrogation were sufficiently confident of the guilt of these fellows, and outraged at their actions, that they thought a little bonus torture was rightful and appropriate. Perhaps they believed that Mohammed might never receive any genuine corporeal punishment for his crimes - either because he might never be convicted of anything or because American punishment so clearly seems to reject pain as a legitimate instrument of punishment. (Gosh, in our modern world, even the death penalty is now (usually) anesthetized.) Given this practical reality, they may have chosen to employ brutal corporeal punishment in the one place they could - the investigatory process. I've met a lot of people since that fateful September day that would have paid good money to waterboard these fellows. And not to garner more useful intelligence.
The demise of publicly sanctioned corporeal punishment - beatings, whippings, stonings, brutal executions - leaves certain people unsatisfied with state punishment. We know what can happen when you beat or shoot a cop. You may be physically battered by officers prior to arraignment. (And probably charged with resisting arrest.) Even fleeing suspects are sometimes physically punished for their decision to run. Can we be surprised if some people believed that there was no better target for this street justice than people involved in the mass killing of Americans?
I would not be at all surprised if the actual investigators employing these techniques, and the people authorizing them, understood waterboards to be just deserts for 9/11. That is not to say that Bybee, Yoo, and Bradbury approved these approaches for that reason - even if they did, their memoranda certainly aren't expressly designed to legitimize waterboarding as punishment for terrorist acts. Perhaps these young lawyers were naifs. But it is to say that when brutal investigative techniques are approved, it is fair to assume that some folks will use them for their investigative value...and others will use them for their brutality.
Image: Judge Jay Bybee, author of one of the famous "torture memos."
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