Waterboarding - Torture? Yes, Necessary? Perhaps

Recently I stumbled into a conversation with a friend about a particular practice of the government that placed me in hot water. The subject happened to be waterboarding. Waterboarding, if you don't already know, involves convincing a prisoner that they are, in fact, drowning. This causes damage (often permanent) to the human psyche. Now, I believe I can safely say that everyone who does not have a bestial attraction to perpetrating acts of violence would prefer waterboarding not to exist. That part's easy. However, the key here is that there are certain benefits to allowing the practice that cause one to simultaneously advocate that waterboarding should continue to be used by the government to serve its purposes. In many people, it is not at all surprising that their will to protect the practice of waterboarding outweighs their willingness to destroy it.

Now, it should be said that the aforementioned purposes of the government should, as a democratic-republican institution (small d, small r), be similar, if not the same, as the people's own. What that means is that if it is true that the government has gone far beyond the intent of the populace to interrogate prisoners, it is certainly just that such a practice stop and new leaders assume power in order to prevent such methods from reappearing under a different name, or in a different form. On the other hand, who is to say that such a discrepancy between government action and the collective intent exists to such a degree that reform is warranted?

Waterboarding is most accurately viewed in two ways: An affront to natural rights (which I shall loosely define as those privileges defined in the Bill of Rights), and a method by which the security of the nation is preserved and its peoples protected from harm. Now, it is obvious at a glance that the first is true. For, no matter what certain politicians wary of losing their job and public status may say, waterboarding is, indeed, torture. However, it is also true that to some extent the second is true as well. Interrogating via waterboarding helps to prevent possible threats from gaining mass and effecting undesirable actions upon the U.S. As you may have noticed, I very carefully said "possible" threats. Now, it is very easy to say that a bullet zooming towards a child's head will cause a great deal of harm. It is only a little easier to predict that a terrorist group just now forming with an anti-America stance will cause significant trouble five years down the line than predicting the price of a particular stock at a similar point in the future (long proved to be essentially impossible in most fields save by sheer luck).

However, unlike several centuries ago, death travels fast. We do not have a year to train our armies as our enemies work their way over treacherous terrain, we have days, perhaps only seconds. Our founders believed that a standing army was harmful to civil liberties, and therefore proposed that only a militia train in the event of a war. This idea fell by the wayside as technology changed, until now our standing armies consume an enormous portion of the federal budget. The same thing affects our stance towards terrorists. With such a limited window of opportunity to prevent harm to our nation, every bit of information gained through interrogation may prove integral to our defense. For while a threat that may or may not coalesce five years in the future may not be worth the violation of natural rights and various civil liberties that waterboarding represents, it is difficult to say that immediate threats to U.S. citizens should lead to the same conclusion. The key bit of this argument is that all threats are by virtue of modern technology essentially immediate.

It is unfortunately true that we cannot fully trust the U.S. government to tell us truthfully how immediate those threats are and how often the information gained through waterboarding causes a threat to be stifled that would not otherwise have been stopped. Still, it can be reasonably assumed that the practice of waterboarding, while violating the rights of those so interrogated, has nonetheless served an irreplaceable role in preserving the safety of the nation. So there it is, on one hand we might end the torture of various persons, and on the other we might protect a great many U.S. citizens from being harmed by terrorist operatives. After acknowledging that, it is up to voters to decide whether or not to allow their elected officials to support waterboarding, and, if so, to what extent.