A former Navy pilot who was waterboarded and thinks it’s okay writes

I’ve enjoyed this blog and reviewing these comments, although I can’t say I’ve read them all carefully. I will ask you all the same thing I asked Mark on his post of today: what is it about waterboarding that you KNOW that leads you to conclude it is torture and a morally instrinsic evil? Any of you experienced it yourselves or seen others undergo this “torture”? Any of you dealt with survivors who are left scarred and wounded from this? Are you willing to say that the Seals who waterboarded me as a training exercise committed a war crime or even engaged in morally evil conduct? Are you saying that KSM and the others are entitled to certain standards of treatment when they are captured? And what would those be? Could they be treated rudely? Could they be physically pushed around? My questions here are not from a legal perspective under Geneva conventions or other positive laws, such as the U.S. military’s own codes. I’m asking for a show of moral reasoning based on moral first principles recognized by the Catholic Church, since this seems to be what is driving Mark.
Thank you.

First off, thanks for your service. I appreciate it–a lot.

With respect to your question, asking if “waterboarding” is torture is sort of like asking if “sex” is rape. Precisely the same physical actions can, in different contexts constitute radically different acts. A man can have sex with his wife and it can be an act of love. A man can force his wife down onto the bed against her will and it can be the gravely immoral act of rape. In the case of military training, the whole point of subjecting people to waterboarding is to *build them into better and stronger men*: to humanize them. In waterboarding prisoner, the whole point is to terrorize the prisoner, dehumanize him, and break him down into something like a frightened animal. That’s part of the double-think involved in justifications for waterboarding and other forms of torture. On the one hand, we are told is “really works” because it has the victim begging in no time. On the other, we’re told it’s not torture.

Are you saying that KSM and the others are entitled to certain standards of treatment when they are captured?

No. The Catholic Church is saying that:

2312 The Church and human reason both assert the permanent validity of the moral law during armed conflict. “The mere fact that war has regrettably broken out does not mean that everything becomes licit between the warring parties.”109

2313 Non-combatants, wounded soldiers, and prisoners must be respected and treated humanely.

And what would those be?

The same things that have have been standard procedure under military regulations for decades.

I’m afraid I don’t understand your last line or two. The moral first principles are pretty obvious: Man is made in the image and likeness of God, so don’t torture him. The general application in wartime with respect to prisoner is spelt out in the Catechism quote above: Treat prisoners humanely. If you aren’t sure what the means: Army and Navy regs, Geneva, and settled international law with the approval of both secular and ecclesial authorities is really really clear. Don’t torture. Waterboarding prisoners is torture (for which we have court-martialed our own and hanged our enemies).

What drives me is quite simple. All arguments for the use of torture are, in the end, a rejection of the Church’s teaching on consequentialism. Reject that, and you have embraced the disastrous moral principle of doing evil so that good may come of it. After a civilization embraces that, all bets are off: the civilization is doomed. Conservatism used to see this. It was the principal argument against the monstrous evil of abortion. Now conservatism is embracing it to justify torture, making itself powerless to go on opposing abortion. If the salt loses its savor, wherewith shall it be made salty again?