More waterboarding Tom Smith

Professor Rappaport writes below about the practice of waterboarding.  I wanted to put in my modest contribution, but only get around to it now.  I feel like I have some insight into what waterboarding feels like.  There are various “submissions” as they are called in the various grappling arts which involve basicly suffocating your opponent.  This is to be distinguished from chokes, of which there are many, and work by cutting off the blood flow to the brain.  When you are choked, you get light headed, and then lose consciousness.  It is certainly unpleasant, but I don’t think it qualifies as torture, though, it can of course be lethal, if done incorrectly, or, under certain circumstances, correctly.  Suffocation is something different.  An opponent can grab your gi, or Asian peasant coat thingy, and wrap it around your face, or press his sweaty upper arm across your nose and mouth, or press your face against his chest or the mat, and so on.  This is more likely to happen when you are close to exhaustion and breathing with difficulty anyway.  So then, you are stuggling to breathe, and very quickly a unique sort of panic sets in.  The instinct to breath is so strong that when you cannot breath, it is a  truly horrible feeling.  Yet, at least some people  can overcome it by training.  Some scuba divers can hold their breath until they pass out; there are cases of people drowning playing that game.  But for almost everyone, the urge to breath is irresistible.  So I think suffocation, which is all water boarding is, should count as torture.  Of course it is torture, if torture means the deliberate infliction of pain.  Being suffocated, while you are conscious anyway, is extremely nasty.  Maybe there is a narrower legal definition.  That is another matter.

For my part, however, I have never understood what all the fuss is about regarding torture.  Somehow torture is supposed to be more wicked than putting somebody in a cage for 20 years.  It beats me.  This may be the only point on which I agree with Professor Dershowitz.  There are circumstances when torture is justified, and there it should be used, if necessary to prevent greater evils, of which the loss of a single innocent life would be one.  You probably need procedures to regulate it.  There might be supervening reasons, such as no government can be trusted with the power to torture, but if you are dealing with people who say, believably, that they sure wish they had a nuclear weapon they could blow up in a big city, your own government is not your worst enemy, untrustworthy though they may be.