Waterboarding rhetoric evaporates under scrutiny

The starkness of the black and white photograph is striking: one soldier holds down the prisoner’s body with his hands and knees, another holds down the rag over the prone figure’s face, and the soldier on the right dumps water from a plastic canteen onto the prisoner’s covered face. This interrogation tactic is known as “waterboarding.”
According to our president, one of our “most valuable weapons in the war on terror” consists of nothing more then a hood and a few containers of water. Waterboarding, for the four of you who don’t know, is an interrogation technique involving the instinctual fear of drowning. A detainee is hooded and held down as water is poured on their head. After a while of not being able to breathe, the person starts to drown. In short, waterboarding creates all of the pain of drowning with none of the release. In the U.S., controversy emerged after it was revealed that waterboarding had been used in the interrogation of various Global War on Terror (GWOT) prisoners.
The Bush Administration’s attitude on waterboarding is that is does not fall under the classification of “torture.” Bush vetoed legislation designed to classify the technique as such March 8.
"The bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror," Bush said in his weekly radio address. "So today I vetoed it.”
Wait. Let me get this straight. The United States of America, the greatest military power the world has seen in recent centuries, possessor of nuclear weapons, smart bombs and lasers, is relying on an interrogation technique first perfected during the Spanish Inquisition (Schweiker, William. "Baptism by Torture")? That’s our big “secret weapon?” Supporters of the technique say it is an effective way of gathering intelligence; detractors say it boils down to torture. I don’t know about you, but I agree with the latter. If you get someone under that kind of duress, they’ll pretty much say anything you want them to. You could probably get me to confess to being Osama bin Laden if you waterboarded me a few times. This, in my mind, makes it a less than effective weapon. The old adage of “quality over quantity” comes to mind; what’s the point of gathering intelligence if it’s not even credible? An example I use is what happened when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a high-ranking Al Queda official, was waterboarded while in U.S. custody. While some of the information he yielded was correct, he also confessed to being a part of 31 different terror plots ("Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's '31 plots'", BBC News, 2007-03-15). I don’t know about you - but the list doesn’t sound true to me. It sounded like he was telling his interrogators exactly what they wanted to hear.
I’ve heard the argument about the fictional scenario about an imminent attack on America, the details of which can only be obtained through waterboarding. Forgive me for being obtuse, but defending out nation probably doesn‘t have all of the testosterone-drenched melodrama of a “Die Hard” movie. Such a scenario, although vaguely, hypothetically plausible, is more wishful thinking than anything else. The odds of actually catching an active terrorist operative, let alone one in the midst of a doomsday plot, aren’t good enough reason to keep waterboarding “above board.” Despite this administration’s repeated claims of “we don’t torture,” the use of techniques like this seems to speak otherwise. The Bush Administration can get away with saying “We don’t torture,” simply because they haven’t classified techniques like waterboarding as torture. I would like to think the American people, indeed the rest of the world, can see through this.
I disagree with American use of waterboarding not because of empathy for America’s enemies. I know the pain of losing people on the front lines of our new war. I lost a relative on 9/11 and an old high school friend during the first battle of Falluja. However, as the United States, we’re supposed to be the beacon of hope in the world. We’re supposed to be the “good guys,” right? How does being the beacon of freedom and hope tie into things like waterboarding? If anything, it gives the very enemies we are fighting more credence in their belief that we’re an evil country that says one thing and does another. How are the people we’re supposed to work with believe our rhetoric of freedom when we employ the same tactics as the regimes we came in to replace? When we stoop to fighting an enemy on his level, do we not run the risk of becoming the very thing we’re trying to destroy?
Those soldiers I mentioned in my opening paragraph were Americans in Vietnam. The photograph was published in the Washington Post in January 1968 (Pincus, Walter, "Waterboarding Historically Controversial; In 1947, the U.S. Called It a War Crime; in 1968, It Reportedly Caused an Investigation" Washington Post, October 5, 2006). This isn’t the first time U.S. forces have used waterboarding - it was also done during the Spanish American War (“Cheney endorses simulated drowning,” Manchester Guardian, Friday, Oct. 27 2006). In my mind, this blows Bush’s argument about not wanting to discuss the technique because it would allow out enemies to train to avoid it. If anything, such an attitude indicates an intense desire for the conversation to end. How exactly does one prepare to be waterboarded? During research for this article, I found that trained CIA agents lasted an average of 14 seconds of waterboarding before caving in (Ross, Brian. "CIA's Harsh Interrogation Techniques Described", ABC News, November 8, 2007). If our own highly-trained intelligence officers can’t prepare to avoid caving during waterboarding, how would our relatively unsophisticated enemies be expected to do the same?
By using waterboarding, we’re putting ourselves alongside historically undesirable company. During the Second World War, secret police forces in Germany and Japan both used waterboarding techniques during interrogations. Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge used waterboarding to torture detainees during their reign in Cambodia. Do we really want to add our name to this list’s company by continuing with this practice? I think we’re better than that - and banning waterboarding would be a step in right direction in proving to both the world and those we fight that we’re the side of light and hope in the global war on terror.

The Pitter-Patter ot Little Feet

For a long time in my life, children were mere miniature adults, every bit as cryptic and cagey as their grown-up creators.
My brother was born in 1986. He is seven years younger than I, and I took every second I could to enjoy him as a baby. It was the first time I’d been close to a newborn, and I realized his perfection was a miracle, even at that young age. In time, he grew from infant to toddler to child to teenager. My time with him was, for a long time, the last constant exposure I’d had to being around an infant/young child. Whatever I’d learned when it came to children had long since buried itself by the time I reached adulthood. For a long time, I never knew what to do around kids. If I tried to act foolish and entertain them, they would treat me as exactly that: a fool who couldn’t entertain them. Unlike adults, children do not know how to be gracious and apply the white lies that adults use to grease social wheels on a regular basis (I.e. - “You look great!,” “No, it’s not trouble,” “Yes, it was good for me too!”). Children call it as they see it simply because they don’t know better.
I remember realizing this a few years ago when I was in a Chinese restaurant. As our food was still being prepared, my friend and I waited out in the lobby. A small boy, probably a relative of the owners, sat with us and engaged in minor chit-chat. He asked us all sorts of questions. One of them was about the boots I was wearing: a pair of brown paratrooper boots that went up my calves and had a leather cap on the toe. He asked me what they were, and I told him. He made a face.
“Why would you want to wear THOSE?” he asked.
I replied that I thought they looked cool. He didn’t agree.
“They look like girl shoes!” he shot back.
An adult wouldn’t say a truth like that, even if he really believed it. An adult would mutter some vague pleasantry like, “Oh, that’s nice.” As opposed to a child, an adult would know better than to speak a true opinion if it were not between friends. As a courtesy, adults will pleasantly smile and conceal, truth be damned. A child doesn’t operate by the same rules. When you smile or make a face at a child and they don’t laugh, they are being genuine. It’s simply not funny to them. How many times have you told a joke and gotten a fake laugh in return? It begs the question, “Which is worse: false humoring or genuine dislike?” With kids, there isn’t the option. They haven’t been conditioned to hide their true feelings yet. Adults do this every single day - and my irrefutable example is the age-old office exchange:
Person One: “How are you?”
Person Two: “Fine, and you?”
Person One: “Good.”
Person Two: “Great.”
It doesn’t matter who the conversation is with, because it’s not an actual inquiry. It’s a formality. It wouldn’t matter if you had cancer. It wouldn’t matter if one of you was one fire. It wouldn’t matter even if you were talking to Adolf Hitler or to the Devil himself. It’s simply one of the scripts we follow on a daily basis. Children don’t play by the same rules; hence the culture shock when I first started being around them on a regular basis again.
When I first met my niece Rosemary, she was less than a year old. I met her not long after I met my wife. At first, I wasn’t sure what to make of her. Adults are pretty easy to charm, but kids can usually tell when a person is being sincere or not. Despite my best efforts, it took her a while to warm up to me. That first meeting consisted of my blabbering to her and her blankly staring back at me. At Thanksgiving dinner, I finally broke through the barrier, and we’ve been buddies ever since. Today, I hung out with my friends and their two children. I’m known as “Crazy Joe,” the third time in my life I’ve somehow earned the moniker. Spending time with them is fun, because now, unlike before, I know how better to interact with them. I understand their view of the world and can adapt my communication skills to fit. For example, I would never have an adult conversation consisting of various versions of the sentence, “What color is this?”
I’m glad I’ve been able to learn how to interact with kids on a somewhat normal basis now. For a long time, I hadn’t the foggiest idea. Now, it’s easy - and it makes me look forward to the day when my kids are able to tell me that I wear boots that would probably look better on a girl.