An End to Waterboarding?

I was bickering with a friend of mine about whether Christians should support the use of waterboarding in the war on terrorism when I realized for certain that the practice is going to end. None of the three major Presidential candidates supports its use. Of the last candidates in the field, however major, there is only one supporter of the practice. Of Ron Paul, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Bill Richardson, and any number of “minor party” candidates, only Gov. Romney supports the interrogation method. That was one more reason why I knew I could never support him.

I remarked that we called waterboarding a war crime when the Japanese did it to us. He simply didn’t believe me. So, as I e-mail the links to him, let me also post it here in case you don’t believe me.

Here’s a simple statement about the Japanese use of waterboarding in World War II courtesy of NPR:

In the war crimes tribunals that followed Japan’s defeat in World War II, the issue of waterboarding was sometimes raised. In 1947, the U.S. charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for waterboarding a U.S. civilian. Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor.

“All of these trials elicited compelling descriptions of water torture from its victims, and resulted in severe punishment for its perpetrators,” writes Evan Wallach in the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law.

Even Americans have been called to account for this atrocity (from the same article):

On Jan. 21, 1968, The Washington Post ran a front-page photo of a U.S. soldier supervising the waterboarding of a captured North Vietnamese soldier. The caption said the technique induced “a flooding sense of suffocation and drowning, meant to make him talk.” The picture led to an Army investigation and, two months later, the court martial of the soldier.

From the Washington Post:

Twenty-one years earlier, in 1947, the United States charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for carrying out another form of waterboarding on a U.S. civilian. The subject was strapped on a stretcher that was tilted so that his feet were in the air and head near the floor, and small amounts of water were poured over his face, leaving him gasping for air until he agreed to talk.

Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. He deserved it, too, and I don’t think that anyone would disagree.

We used to know what torture was, and we used to have a principle that the US would never do such a thing. Today, though, observing human standards of conduct is seen as a sign of weakness. That, I believe, is the result of losing moral values — among liberals we see it in such things as abortion and euthanasia, among conservatives we see it in craving torture.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about the Bush administration, but I do have to say that one of the things which I simply can’t overlook and will be glad to see end is the use of waterboarding and the parsing of whether it qualifies as legally-prohibited torture.

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