"Waterboarding"

Just last week, I was having a conversation with my sister about how the election has really taken over most of our news coverage and left the current President on the back burner. I thought I'd check up on him and see what newsworthy events are happening in our current administration. Rosa Brooks' piece in the LA Times speaks precisely to this lack of attention and its horror story-like consequences...torture.

Torture has actually been in the news quite a bit these last few days. A steady stream of articles and editorial pieces have covered the issue of "waterboarding" and the recent confession by CIA Director Michael Hayden that the US used this torture tactic against accused terrorists several times in the last few years. The Senate recently approved a measure to require all US interrogators to follow the Army Field Manual (which limits them to 19 interrogation tactics and excludes waterboarding); however, President Bush is threatening to veto it. A Washington Post article by Richard E. Mezo, who served in the Navy for 6 years, gives a detailed account of his personal experience of waterboarding during Naval "survival training." Mezo points out the not-so-subtle linguistic change from water torture to waterboarding and calls the act a "crime against humanity."

What is going on in our country? I fear that the nation's preoccupation with the future president has turned our attention away from what we think of as a lame duck president. I also worry that our frontrunners in this election, all of whom are currently Senators, are neglecting their responsibilities as such. Neither Obama nor Clinton voted on the Senate proposal regarding the Army Field Manual. Surely it is a delicate balance of doing your job and trying to be elected to a new one. But why are we not more outraged by this recent confession of torture and the President's determination to uphold the CIA and other interrogators' right to torture? From the Washington Post:

Mr. Bush continues to resist calls for the suspension of policies that erode the values of this country, put U.S. personnel at greater risk of being abused and are largely counterproductive because detainees desperate to avert pain provide unreliable information. Earlier efforts to outlaw torture through the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military Commissions Act have fallen victim to the Bush administration's legal duplicities. The administration, which recently admitted the use of waterboarding on three terrorism suspects before enactment of those laws, still refuses to declare definitively that waterboarding is illegal even under the new legal scheme.

It seems as though our current administration, in its perennial focus on "national security," is more concerned with protecting the government's freedom than protecting our country's moral authority in the global community. The two are intricately connected. How can we gain or even keep global allies if we are seen as morally bankrupt--denying human rights left and right, at our choosing? Acting as if we are above international law? As mentioned in Brooks' LA Times article:

The administration's PR push on waterboarding doesn't enjoy much support, either internationally or here at home. Our closest allies, the British, reaffirmed Tuesday that they consider waterboarding a form of torture prohibited by international law. That's an opinion shared by the U.N. human rights commissioner.