JPod on Waterboarding

As to the overall merits of Commentary these days, Scott provided an apt summary the other day. As to the overall merits of the magazine’s blog, I can’t offer much more than this from the new editor, whose views of, say, the Spanish Inquisition or the Amboyna Massacre might be described as awfully generous:

Punishment techniques like waterboarding were invented precisely not to be acts of torture as commonly understood, but rather to simulate acts of torture. In the case of waterboarding, the intent is not to drown or nearly to drown (a classic torture method) but to invoke the primal fear of drowning. In both cases, of course, the purpose is to cause the sufferer to become so fearful that he will do whatever it takes not to endure the experience again. But when someone’s head is held under water, he may actually be drowned. When someone is waterboarded, he will not.

Earlier, Podhoretz confuses torture with mere sadism by claiming that “the intent” of torture is to produce injury; this allows him (or so he thinks) to insist that waterboarding “is actually an avoidance of physical brutality” and thus — like mirthfully smothering your little brother with a pillow — amounts to nothing more than “psychic game-playing,” a “gruesome fake-out.”

Of course JPod is wrong on nearly every count here, just as he stands universally in error about movies and television. I’ll defer to the actual philosophers who read this blog, but his notion of human psychology appears to be frozen somewhere in the 17th century. More consequentially, he seems not to have read anything about the technique he aims to defend. If he had, he’d at least be aware (as Malcolm Nance wrote last week) that the physical risks of water torture are extraordinary; it isn’t, Nance pointed out, a technique that “simulates” drowning; it is drowning. Finally, Podhoretz and others should be reminded that the “gruesome fake-out” is nothing less than a mock execution, which is a violation of international law in its own right. When photos of “gruesome fake-out” firing squads surfaced in Afghanistan in 2004, the Army destroyed them to avoid further embarrassment after the Abu Ghraib disclosures. I have yet to find Podhoretz’s glowing review of this “gruesome fake-out,” but I’m sure it exists somewhere.

All of this is of course beside the point, which is that defenders of waterboarding are now reduced to scribbling one incoherent brief after another on behalf of a practically and morally indefensible procedure. Why anyone would want to stake his or her intellectual and moral reputation on this is beyond me, but I suppose someone with nothing to lose is capable of anything.