The politics of waterboarding

Bing West:

In his op-ed, Mr. Nance on waterboarding successfully squared the circle when he wrote: "I have personally led, witnessed and supervised waterboarding of hundreds of people. Waterboarding should never be used as an interrogation tool. It is beneath our values. Is there a place for the waterboard? Yes. It must go back to the realm of training our operatives, soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines."

This professional website is not the place to untangle Mr. Nance's eschatology. Waterboarding has become a tool of political gotcha that demeans serious discussion of the changing values underlying our operational approach to national security. It is politics, not morality, when senators vote their conscience along overwhelmingly party lines.

The repetition of the word waterboard is a means of embarrassing the current administration at the risk of narrowing the interrogation options that a president, current or future, may choose. That is why Senator Clinton has been circumspect in her comments. Both Mr. Tenet and Gen. Hayden have been firm in arguing that there is solid evidence that American lives have been saved by harsh interrogation. Picking on one technique is a political maneuver.

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Mr. Nance writes that he personally supervised the waterboarding of "hundreds of people". Nothing like that is going on. Nothing. The CIA has said the number of harsh interrogations is very low, implying a figure of perhaps ten to twenty in five years. The senators on the oversight committees have been briefed for years on the specifics. The Senate chose twice not to pass legislation banning waterboarding. Now they have stirred up a ruckus that forces them to take another vote in order to avoid being called hypocrites.

This subject has been exaggerated for political gain.

I suspect that most of Mr. Nance's waterboardings have been in training exercises for our troops. However, West makes an important point in the political posturing that waterboarding is producing. I am not sure it is even good politics outside of the Euroweenie world. Most Americans think Jack Bauer is doing the right thing in order to stop the mass murder of innocent noncombatants. The posturing and the pretensions of moral superiority are detrimental to our national security and a product of putting political interest above our security interest.