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Bush cabinet: All in favor of waterboading, say Aye. (AP Photo)
Perhaps you recall the way the Republicans and the media climbed all over Bill Clinton about his quandary about the definition of “is.”
Why, one might easily ask, are those same people not climbing all over John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales when they can’t seem to agree on a definition of waterboarding? Ashcroft, in an interview reported in the New York Times on Monday, said there were many definitions of waterboarding. Try as I might, all the definitions I can find exhibit stunning similarities to the one found on Wikipedia, i.e., that it is a form of torture and includes forced suffocation just short of death, inflicting both mental agony and “extreme pain, dry drowning, damage to lungs, brain damage from oxygen deprivation, other physical injuries including broken bones due to struggling against restraints, lasting psychological damage or, ultimately, death” according to Wikipedia, and ratified by at last a dozen other sources.
Even a site dedicated to investigating the issue and procedures of waterboarding, waterboarding.org (which I found rather soft on waterboarding, actually), opens the site with this quote referring to waterboarding a prisoner:
"His sufferings must be that of a man who is drowning, but cannot drown." ?Lt. Grover Flint, Philippine-American War
Suffering. That would seem to be a prime target of torture. At least it was for those who invented the thumbscrew, the rack, cutting out tongues, cutting off noses and ears, poking out eyes and other human rights horror shows. Mr. Ashcroft would have made a fine Inquisitor General. And Mr. Gonzales, who shares a cultural history with the authors of the Spanish Inquisition, might be able to work his way up to the top job, if only we can manage to install him in office again. In that same interview, he said that it would be a shame to outlaw waterboarding (hint: it is already outlawed, globally) because such techniques “may be necessary in the future.”
I did get a laugh out of people posting about the issue on Huffington Post. One wrote, “I have to agree with him (Gonzales) there. In order to get to the truth about who orchestrated this 'legal' justification, we may have to use enhanced techniques to get Ashcroft and Gonzales to come clean. And since both of them have publicly stated that all these methods weren't torture, they shouldn't have any problem getting slapped, chained, walled and a little wet.”
Frankly, I don’t think the ethical reaction to the scurrilous self-justification of these two unindicted war criminals can be stated better than that. The only ethical quandary remaining is this:
How hard should we be pushing Mr. Obama to open investigations?
There are a couple of aspects to consider. For instance, is it more ethical to allow these overgrown juvenile delinquents to continue on the loose with no supervision, spewing their idiocies and hatreds into the media? Or would it be more ethical to embarrass our nation publicly by bringing their misdeeds to light and offering them a trial by their peers?
I think it would be very difficult to embarrass this nation any more than it has been embarrassed already. I cannot think of one single thing the Bush Administration did that was not embarrassing, and embarrassment was the least of the problems with that Regime. So, despite the intense emotion an investigation would raise in the population (although it boggles the mind to think any of us could condone torture for any reason), it would seem more ethical to take the course of opening an investigation. This nation has already been besmirched and embarrassed; it would seem only just that we admit our own complicity in this by shining some light on what we have done, and owning it, as they say. A little additional embarrassment would seem a small price to pay for cleansing our national conscience and restoring our national soul.
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