Experience Need Not Apply

Here is just one of several postings in the blogosphere in which the writer suggests that those who doubt that waterboarding is torture undergo it themselves. I appreciate the spirit of this debating point, and I agree with the underlying claim it is making, but it grants too much to the deniers.

Waterboarding has been labeled "simulated drowning", but there is nothing simulated about the drowning. The only thing simulated, arguably, is death by drowning, as waterboarding involves reviving the victim. The victim, of course, cannot know that he will be revived -- for that matter, the torturer cannot be certain that he'll successfully pull back before the victim actually dies -- and therefore the victim loses consciousness with no reason to believe he will survive the ordeal.

It is, by design, a physical and psychological ordeal -- this is prima facie and undeniable. Waterboarding is designed to extract information by use of the instinctual panic together with the physical agony of drowning. As such it is torture; notwithstanding AG Mukasey's absurd casuistries, there are no nuances to consider. We no more need experience to know it is torture than we would need experience to know it would be torture to slam the detainee's kneecaps with a hammer, or lift the detainee into the air by a noose around his neck, or apply red-hot steel to the detainee's bare hands.

There's no good reason to indulge this despicable and degrading verbal game-playing and legalistic equivocating. Waterboarding is torture.