March 18, 2007
Waterboarding Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:25 PM EST With respect to the slave trade and Elizabethan sea dogs, John Steele Gordon writes that Sir John Hawkins was England’s first slaver, but I think John Lok has priority, with a voyage in 1555, and William Towerson was apparently the second, in 1557. Adm. Sir John Hawkins, chief architect of Elizabeth’s navy, was admittedly a pioneer in the English slave trade. In 1560 he formed a syndicate of wealthy merchants to invest in the trade, and Queen Elizabeth invested in his second voyage, in 1564, which made a 60 percent profit. (Sir Francis Drake was also a slaver.) I agree that English profits from the trade become much greater in the next century. My point was that Elizabethan political morality is not ours. As for waterboarding, opinions differ. Among others, Senator John McCain thinks it is torture, Vice President Cheney does not. The current Army Field Manual (released in September 2006) on the topic, Human Intelligence Collector Operations, prohibits the practice. We were less tolerant of waterboarding in the past. In 1947 the United States convicted and imprisoned a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, for abuses of an American civilian that included a version of waterboarding, and included charges of what would now be called waterboarding in other cases against Japanese accused of torture. The United Kingdom executed Japanese who carried out versions of waterboarding during World War II, and Norway tried Germans for similar activities. The State Department has condemned variants of the practice when it has been carried out by foreign governments. Our government has in the past condemned its use against American POWs by the North Koreans and North Vietnamese. As for what Walsingham would have considered torture, I am not sure, but as I noted in the previous post, our political morality differs in various respects from his. I do know that many passionate supporters of the war in Iraq reject waterboarding. Whatever might or might not be countenanced in a ticking-bomb case, especially one involving significant numbers of civilian deaths, I think it is important to distinguish such cases from what has sometimes occurred since 9/11. Most people think the harm we have done our cause has significantly exceeded any intelligence gains we have made from techniques that look like torture to many reasonable observers. In the last few years, the Israeli high court, which exists in a society that does face ticking bombs, has moved against interrogation by means of what the Israelis called “moderate physical pressure,” including stress positions, one of the techniques American interrogators have used. My memory of the Israeli legal decision is that it still allow interrogators the theoretical defense of necessity, but the burden of proof is on the interrogator. The defense is not to be accepted automatically.
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