The Awesome Human Capacity for Rationalization of Evil

A reader alerts me to the following exchange from the Corner:

Sounds Like Torture to Me [Jonah Goldberg]

I’ve always been on the fence about whether waterboarding constituted torture. But if the reports are true that the CIA used it scores of times in a single month on a single prisoner, than I think the threshhold has been met. Debating wether it was worth it still seems open to debate, depending on the facts. But I think waterboarding someone 183 times in a month does amount to torture no matter how you slice it.

Update: Interesting take from a military guy:

Jonah,

As my last email hinted, with sarcasm, we have a different perspective around the office here (as we are all veterans). Some of us were waterboarded ourselves during our training (learning how to resist interrogation).

I can assure you that waterboarding is something to be avoided, and it is most unpleasant. You CAN be drowned during the process and whether that happens depends on the mercy of your captors. The reason it’s used is that it doesn’t cause any damage (unless you’re actually drowned).

So from our perspective, anyone who can withstand 183 turns at the waterboard is either SUPER TOUGH because it took 183 turns to get all the info out of him, or he has figured out that his captors are not actually going to kill him and has stopped fearing the technique.

Thus it may be “torture,” but in this case it is not very effective torture. Truly brutal techniques work much faster.

This reader agrees:

Very different take on your torture comments. If something was happening to me 6 times every day for a month, it is quite safe to say it isn’t very torturious. If it was torture and as bad as the liberals say it is nobody would tolerate 6 times every day for a month. At it worst it sounds like something someone got used to rather quickly and decided it wasn’t all that bad and certainly worth holding out.

So, according to the Rubber Hose Right it’s *not* torture *because* it was done 183 times. Now, I recall back in the day, when torture apologists were explaining that it was not torture because it was so brutal and effective that KSM cracked instantly. “A couple of dunking and it was all over. What’s the big deal?” Now we are told that he didn’t crack instantly by the same apologists for torture–and that this proves it’s not a big deal too. What nobody seems to be considering is that the victim doesn’t get to decide how frequently he gets tortured–the torturers decide that. What they are also not considering at all is the very real possibility that the frequency of the torture may bear no relationship at all to the information (whatever it was) that was obtained. They seem to have the notion that it is not possible that people who do this stuff for a living might just enjoy their work.

But yeah. Sure. Waterboarding somebody 183 times. That’s not torture.

Enjoy the bubble.