About a month ago, the conservative New York Times columnist Bill Kristol confessed to Jon Stewart that he is “ambivalent on torture.” It’s tempting to condemn him for this (though he should be commended for his honest language, avoiding Orwellian euphemisms like “enhanced interrogation techniques”). However, I fear that this sentiment is widely shared among Americans. By and large, these people aren’t sadists. Most either believe that waterboarding simply isn’t torture or that, even if it is, saving American lives from evil terrorist attacks justifies the technique. I hope I can convince these people just how wrong they are.

Waterboarding, the most controversial of the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” employed by the Bush administration, is often called “simulated drowning.” This is misleading, however. It is “simulated” in the sense that the victim will not actually “drown” (read: “die”). The goal of waterboarding is not to kill but to cause suffering, and the suffering induced by waterboarding is not simulated at all. I’ve never experienced the feeling of drowning, but I suspect that it is agonizing. If it weren’t, why would the government expect that it would produce information from suspected terrorists? Torture is thought to be so effective precisely because it is so unbearable. If waterboarding merely makes a person “uncomfortable,” as Deroy Murdock of the National Review has claimed, it is absurd to think that it would force a fanatical terrorist who does not fear death to betray his or her cause.

Some might say that even if waterboarding is torture, it has happened so rarely that it should not be a major concern. After all, CIA Director Michael Hayden has claimed that the government has only used waterboarding on three prisoners. If we assume Hayden is telling the truth, this objection has some merit. It is indeed a mistake to focus exclusively on waterboarding, because the U.S. has been complicit in many other forms of torture. When former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld approved a memorandum authorizing the forced standing of detainees, he glibly declared, “I stand for eight to 10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to four hours?” Perhaps it is because, in the words of torture expert Darius Rejali, “forced standing causes the ankles and feet to swell to twice their size within 24 hours. Moving becomes agonizing and large blisters develop. The heart rate increases, and some people faint. The kidneys eventually shut down.” Many are not even aware that U.S. personnel have tortured some detainees to death. I know of three: Habibullah and Dilawar at Bagram prison in Afghanistan and Manadel al-Jamadi at Abu Ghraib. This does not even take into account the “extraordinary rendition” of suspected terrorists to other countries, where they are tortured on our behalf.

Even when faced with this horrifying information, some might still insist that the war on terror demands that we torture. Without the information procured by torture, the argument goes, the U.S. is unacceptably vulnerable to terrorist attacks. The logic of this argument culminates in the “ticking time bomb” thought experiment often cited as a justification for torture. In this scenario, the authorities have captured a terrorist who has planted a bomb in a populated area. They somehow know that the explosion is imminent and that the suspect knows the bomb’s location (though for some reason, this knowledge will not help them find the bomb itself). The only option, then, is to torture the suspect. This situation, however, is sheer fantasy. It is not merely unlikely, but logically incoherent. Any attack which is imminent enough to justify the torture in the first place cannot be stopped by torture. Torture apologists take for granted that the torture will force the prisoner to confess, that the prisoner will not lie and that the information, if true, will allow the authorities to act quickly enough to prevent disaster. This type of scenario may occur weekly on episodes of “24,” but I have never heard anyone produce an example of it occurring in the real world.

I don’t believe that torture is an effective way to stop terrorism, but that’s almost beside the point. It’s depressing that our public debate over torture is now largely about the outcome of a consequentialist calculus. During World War II, America distributed posters which declared that torture was “the method of the enemy.” That we could not do the same today is a shocking and tragic state of affairs.

Bill is a senior in Arts & Sciences. He can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].

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