Tortured definitions discouraging

For a millisecond, we could actually feel reassured.

In a profile by Lawrence Wright in the current issue of The New Yorker, Adm. Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence, responded quickly to the question “Have we gotten meaningful information through torture?”

“We don’t torture,” McConnell said flatly.

That was a relief. So reading further was probably a mistake.

That’s where McConnell gets into the question of what practices are torture, and what are, say, “enhanced interrogation.”

Or what Vice President Cheney might call making organs optional.

McConnell offers a definition of torture – “Is it excruciatingly painful to the point of forcing someone to say something because of the pain?” – that seems to fit not only the idea, but various things that it’s pretty clear that U.S. interrogators currently do.

Coming into his job in 2005, McConnell says, he took his own look at U.S. practices, which at the time reportedly included waterboarding, a technique from the Spanish Inquisition that forces water through the nose to create a sensation of drowning. But, he explains, “I sat down with the doctors and the medical personnel who oversee the process. Our policies are not torture.”

Still, you might feel a little less relieved than you were a few paragraphs ago.

After that, Wright keeps asking, and McConnell keeps not saying, whether waterboarding is torture?

“I know one thing,” McConnell says finally. “I’m a water-safety instructor, but I cannot swim without covering my nose. I don’t know if it’s some deviated septum or mucous membrane, but water just rushes in,” meaning, “waterboarding would be excruciating. … Whether it’s torture by anybody else’s definition, for me it would be torture.”

But maybe not for everybody.

To the world out there, if the United States is waterboarding its prisoners, something’s deviated – and it’s more than a septum.

Last month in Iowa, 15 retired generals and admirals sought meetings with all the presidential candidates on the subject. Previously, they had successfully lobbied Congress for an amendment by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., that would ban torture, requiring all interrogations to follow the Army Field Manual.

The Bush administration fought for months to defeat the amendment, including postponing the military appropriations bill that carried it. When that failed, and it passed both houses by veto-proof margins, the president signed the bill – then issued a signing statement noting he didn’t consider himself bound by the amendment.

Although, as President Bush has said many times, the United States doesn’t torture people.

Nobody, after all, wants to proclaim that torture is our policy, and what’s it to you? But to avoid doing that, it requires some careful tiptoeing around just what we mean by torture.

In 2002, the Justice Department produced a famous memo saying that for a practice to qualify as torture, physical pain “must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.”

In other words, as people sometimes say in street basketball, no autopsy, no foul.

That memo was eventually renounced – at least publicly. But in 2005, as Wright points out, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales declared that whatever U.S. interrogators had done wasn’t torture.

Then you get the kind of careful statements, couched in the language of medical consultations and deviated septums, that McConnell offers.

What this means for the American position in the rest of the world can be imagined. As McConnell admits, “When Abu Ghraib happened, my view was that we had lost the moral high ground.”

The impact of our policies, and our careful phrasings, might be found in another explanation of torture, one suggested by Rep. Brian Baird, D-Wash., a psychologist before he got into his present line of work. He defines torture as “When you do it to someone I love, I want to kill you.”

There seem to be lots of folks in the world who think we qualify.