HBO Poll Sez … Little, Or No

Seven comments on this post so far. Add yours!

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  BethB on May 04 at 8:37 a.m.

  I’d be interested in a poll that asked whether people supported torture in circumstances where we know the prisoner has no information of imminent harm because he has been in custody for months - because that’s the circumstance we had in this country with the ones we waterboarded.

  We had a number of “24” -type hypotheticals shared on HBO over the weekend, and I appreciate people’s sincerity in presenting them. But let’s ask the question of reality, which is the circumstance that confronts us. Do you support torture, using propaganda-generating type techniques (not loaded words but based on the truth and an understanding of the SERE program) when we know the prisoner cannot even have any imminent-harm information because we’ve had him in custody for so long already?

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  Don_Sausser on May 04 at 9:30 a.m.

  Beth, I am concerned about definitions of the word “torture”. Has anyone died or been injured by waterboarding?

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  BethB on May 04 at 10:24 a.m.

  Don, you ask a big question - not big in the sense of debatable (at least, not for me) but big in the sense of information. Well, and your question seems to equate torture with a requirement that the person die or be injured to qualify, which isn’t the definition of torture, since it includes extreme mental distress. Though presumably there are cases of death and/or serious injury, since if waterboarding is not terminated, it does kill the person.

  These are things I know about waterboarding - and Don, feel free to email me at bethatlaw@gmail.com if you want to have a longer discussion - (a) we put on trial and executed Japanese soldiers in World War II for waterboarding American prisoners; (b) in a case of waterboarding out of Texas in 1983, a sheriff put up the defense that waterboarding wasn’t torture, but that defense was rejected (10 year sentence - prosecuted by Reagan DOJ); (c) waterboarding is prohibited under the Geneva Convention and the U.S. Army Field Manual; (d) the SERE (survival training) program in our military, which prepared our soldiers for potential torture in other countries, prepared them for waterboarding; (e) Daniel Levin, successor (once removed) of Jay Bybee - one of the torture memo authors - decided he needed to be waterboarded to determine whether it was or was not torture and decided it could not be used as it was potential illegal torture - he was fired before his memo tightening controls could be completed; (f) please do not waterboard me. What I find interesting about Levin’s experience is that he concluded waterboarding could only be allowed in extremely limited circumstances (e.g., for a few seconds), and that there was no such controls over the type of waterboarding we were doing to prisoners. So maybe that is a little bit of a distinction - though I’ve heard no one argue that the “waterboarding” we did was only for three seconds or so.

  Here is a link to the definition of waterboarding on Wikipedia:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding

  Here is a link to an article about Daniel Levin:

  http://abcnews.go.com/WN/DOJ/Story?id=3814076&page=1

  And here is an article by a SERE instructor who says it is torture - no way around the conclusion - and points out that waterboarding is not “simulated drowning” because the lungs do, in fact, fill with water:

  http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2007/10/31/2007-10-31_i_know_waterboarding_is_torture__because.html

  Hope this helps.

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  Sisyphus on May 04 at 10:31 a.m.

  I don’t know about waterboarding in particular but certainly extraordinary rendition has resulted in many deaths. I’m not sure the relevance of the question since waterboarding is designed to cause a body to react as if it was in mortal peril on a very visceral level. Again I’ll plug Taxi To the Dark Side for you fact hungry people.

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