SO IS WATERBOARDING TORTURE?
Again, we do not know the details of waterboarding as practiced (if, as reported, it is or has been practiced) by the CIA. Yet, we know generally that waterboarding is very rough stuff. It is not especially painful physically and causes no lasting bodily injury; yet, it is intended to create the sensation of drowning in a person who is bound and temporarily suffocated. Administered by someone who knows what he is doing, there is presumably no actual threat of drowning or suffocation; for the victim, though, there is clearly fear of imminent death and he could pass out from the deprivation of oxygen.
The sensation is temporary, not prolonged. There shouldn't be much debate that subjecting someone to it repeatedly would cause the type of mental anguish required for torture. But what about doing it once, twice, or some number of instances that were not prolonged or extensive?
Reasonable minds can and do differ on this. Personally, I don't believe it qualifies. It is not in the nature of the barbarous sadism universally condemned as torture, an ignominy the law, as we've seen, has been patently careful not to trivialize or conflate with lesser evils. The Washington Post and Sen. Edward Kennedy have pointed to a World War II era war crimes prosecution by the U.S. against a Japanese soldier who used what was described as "water torture" on an American civilian. But they've failed to note that this was far from the only conduct at issue; the soldier was also charged with having engaged, over a sustained period of time, in "beating using hands, fists, club; kicking;
burning using cigarettes; strapping on a stretcher head downward." The case hardly stands for the proposition that isolated instances of waterboarding would be torture.
Moreover, American military and intelligence services reportedly use (or, at least, have used) waterboarding in their counter-interrogation training programs. Congress carved no exception into torture law for such exercises. Consequently, a conclusion that waterboarding is torture would be tantamount to a finding that our own services are committing a heinous felony, the equivalent of a war crime, against our own operatives ?- something I believe it is fair to say Congress cannot possibly have intended.
IS WATERBOARDING A VIOLATION OF THE McCAIN AMENDMENT?
One might think the question whether waterboarding is torture should be academic. After all, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment is also unlawful. Given that waterboarding is close enough to torture that reasonable minds can differ on whether it is torture, one would figure waterboarding must, a fortiori, qualify as CID. I believe that is certainly true the vast majority of the time. But the matter is not so cut and dried that we can responsibly say it is true all of the time. And the reason for this is that Congress, which has had countless opportunities to make simulated drowning illegal, has declined to do so.
In late 2005, after revelations about the "torture memo" and against the backdrop of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, Congress enacted the McCain Amendment as part of the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA). That Amendment eviscerates any contention (based on the theory that the Constitution does not have extra-territorial reach) that CID prohibitions do not apply overseas. The McCain Amendment, however, continued to define CID in accordance with the Fifth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. As a result, one can argue that it does not undermine the contention that those protections apply only to civilian legal proceedings, not to the detention and interrogation of alien enemy combatants in wartime.
While this admittedly technical contention remains colorable, I doubt it would or should prevail. Whatever one thinks of Senator McCain's amendment, it was indisputably a reaction to concerns over wartime detentions. It would be bizarre to think Congress went through such an exercise only to pass something that was irrelevant to the problem it sought to address.
Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that, although waterboarding figured prominently in the McCain Amendment debate, Congress opted not to end any ambiguity over its legality; instead, it chose to stick with banning "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" ?- simulated drowning was not specified.
The consequence of this impossible vagueness was to grind interrogations to a halt. Indeed, some intelligence officers purchased litigation insurance, fearful that actions they'd taken based on Justice Department advice might nevertheless lead to investigations and ruinous legal expenses.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court decided the Hamdan case, holding that the Geneva Conventions' Common Article 3 ?- which the Court found to be incorporated into a statute, the Uniform Code of Military Justice ?- provided some protection for enemy combatants. The narrow issue in Hamdan was military commissions, not interrogations. Common Article 3, however, broadly prohibits not only irregular tribunals but also, among other things, "violence to life and person," "torture," "cruel treatment," and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment." So, the question naturally arose, did Common Article 3 now govern all detention and interrogation? And if so, who gets to decide what its terms mean? Would the United States be bound by, say, the International Court of Justice's construction of such vague terms as "outrages upon personal dignity"?
Clarification was imperative for this confused landscape. Congress endeavored to provide it in 2006 when it passed the Military Commissions Act. The MCA made clear that issues of detention and interrogation would be controlled not by Common Article 3 but by American law: specifically, the McCain Amendment.
Furthermore, recognizing that our intelligence officers needed guidelines more precise than the vaporous injunction to avoid "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment, Congress amended the War Crimes Act (Section 2441 of Title 18, U.S. Code) to specify which "grave breaches" of international law could give rise to criminal prosecution.
The list is long but once again (and despite the specter of waterboarding that hung over the debate) Congress elected to include "torture" and "cruel or inhumane treatment," but not simulated drowning ?- or, in fact, degrading treatment, even though it, of course, is illegal under the McCain amendment.
So is waterboarding illegal? It is ironic, and quite typical Washington fare, that the same elected officials now demanding a definitive answer from Judge Mukasey have failed to give us one themselves ?- though some of them, unlike Mukasey, are aware of classified details. Alas and alack, it is all too familiar that chatterers who should know better, like Prof. Turley, are so quick to caricature and demagogue a complex issue in order to call attention to themselves.
It is perilous to launch when one doesn't know key facts. Moreover, given the stakes for our intelligence officers, Mukasey has been wise to avoid doing so despite railing from the peanut gallery. But I'll hazard an opinion: Waterboarding should be considered illegal, under the McCain Amendment, in almost all instances. Certainly, it would be unlawful to make it a programmatic approach to interrogations; if there is a sliver of legality at all, it must be reserved for good-faith emergencies.
That line of reasoning would ban just about all waterboarding. Should Mukasey be more categorical than that? Why shouldn't he just go with the flow and say, yes, by all means, waterboarding is always and everywhere unlawful? Well, because it might not be true. The senators on the Judiciary Committee were rather insistent that an attorney-general nominee have the moxie to tell the president what the law is, no matter what the president might want to hear. Does the same principle not also hold true for United States senators?
On this issue, the Congress has not given us clear guidance. It has instead given us the Fifth Amendment and told us to go figure out what that means for ourselves. That is not very helpful.
For example, in its 2000 Dickerson decision, the Supreme Court held that the core Fifth Amendment guarantee against coerced confessions now includes Miranda protections. Do we thus owe alien enemy combatants captured in wartime an immediate right to counsel, present during all questioning, at the American people's expense? Does anyone really doubt there are federal judges ?- perhaps many of them ?- who would reason that McCain Amendment bars all coercive interrogation forbidden by the Fifth Amendment and, therefore, that it requires Miranda warnings for enemy prisoners?
Let us assume, though, that the McCain Amendment's incorporation of the Fifth Amendment is directed at what is more commonly conceived of as cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. That means we are left to ask: Does the particular use of any technique shock the conscience?
So here is the question: If we captured a top al Qaeda operative who was certain to have information about what we reasonably believed was an imminent plan to attack midtown Manhattan with a nuclear weapon, would it shock your conscience if an intelligence officer waterboarded that operative in a desperate attempt to thwart the attack and save thousands of lives? 