Remember 10th Grade Geometry?
If A=B and B=C, then A=C.
Simple, huh? Deductive reasoning.
John McCain has been tortured. John McCain has not been waterboarded.
So then, Waterboarding is torture? True or false?
Clearly, these hypotheses lead to a dead end, for John McCain’s experiences with torture do not lead to any inference or conclusion about waterboarding whatsoever.
The only inference that can be drawn is that John McCain doesn’t necessarily know about waterboarding.
John McCain believes waterboarding is torture. So do a lot of other people, including many legal scholars. But George W Bush believes waterboarding is not torture. Dick Cheney believes waterboarding is not torture. And Rick Santorum also believes waterboarding is not torture, and moreover, has gone on to say:
[McCain] doesn’t understand how enhanced interrogation (waterboarding) works…
to which McCain aide and friend, Mark Salter replied:
“For pure, blind stupidity, nobody beats Santorum. In my 20 years [working] in the Senate, I never met a dumber member, which he reminded me of today.
The McCain family is said to have all fallen away in dead faint. (feint, sic)
The far more interesting line of hypotheses seeking a deductive result are actually laid out by Mr Salter here, not Santorum, for he seeks a result based on the falsity of Santorum’s remark, which can only be made false by this simple equation:
John McCain knows torture, ergo, he knows waterboarding.
Hence my title.
John McCain doesn’t know dick about waterboarding.
Now I’m not going to bend over backward defending waterboarding, for it is indeed an enhanced form of interrogation, and with many, like child spanking, it carries a lot of emotional and cultural baggage that colors one’s opinions about it. I won’t debate those opinions here.
I do defend it tactically, mainly because it is painless in the hands of men seeking information and not wishing to kill or inflict pain for that reason alone. Of course it can kill. But so can a barber’s razor become an instrument of torture in the hands of someone wishing to inflict pain. Waterboarding doesn’t hurt as thumb-screws, the rack, or pliers-to-toenails hurt. Rather it frightens. More accurately it scares the hell out of you, for it causes the Body to basically take over from the Mind momentarily with involuntary paroxysms of panic (those who have nearly drowned know this sensation), then reminding the Mind that “this is not a thing you want to put me through again.” It is the thing nightmares are made of.
You may think this is torture. No matter, to date the law does not agree.
I had a friend who died only last week. In the 1960s he was like Charles Krauthammer, a lawyer/law professor as well as a PhD psychologist. A liberal, in the 1960s he put forth a very provocative thesis which made him an enemy of the Left, for he wanted to develop a way to “neuter” psychopaths without surgery. His cure involved the same sort of water use as a way to make psychopaths harmless without that old surgical frontal lobotomy thingy so popular in the day.
He was widely excoriated, although, in practice, not just theory, it worked. What it did not do was return a violent psychopath back to society. Instead, it reduced him to a whimpering, dependent puppy dog for the remainder of his days.
So, the really cynical Gitmo interrogators could have had Khalid Sheik Muhammed shining their shoes every day, or cutting the grass with hand clippers. Or even doing windows. Instead, he was only asked for information. You want social engineering, aka, social lobotomies, waterboarding’s your ticket. Getting a man to talk is just elementary stuff, for it is not a technique one withstands. There is only “how much can a man endure?” At some point the Body just takes over from the mind.
The problem we have with torture, is, like child abuse, there is both a legal definition and a cultural one. The same goes for alcoholism. The regular weekend drunk isn’t necessarily a clinical alcoholic. These days, many consider a swat on a kid’s ass “child abuse” while the law says “No” and the Old Testament even firmly recommends its.
Just because someone says waterboarding is torture doesn’t make it so. Torture has a legal meaning. It has to be defined precisely, not broadly, and it must be sanctionable, i.e, in the UN it must apply to China and Iran and not just one little camp in Cuba. To date, waterboarding is not included in those definitions in the United States, and nothing John McCain says can change that. It’s his opinion, and his opinion carries little weight with me.
The same with El Presidente. He has indeed banned its used by Executive Order, but that ban extends to departments of government under his control and carries no criminal sanctions, although Eric Holder is trying to “write in” a crime for use when he wants to. But Eric Holder is lawless on such a broad scale hardly anyone notices.
Nor can Obama fake a deep concern about torture, for the same Middle East he is so hellbent in seeing “rise” to the status of new popular peoples’ social(ist)-democracies (Google this term and see where it leads you) are also the world’s masters of torture, and have been for centuries…as were the former socialist-demokracies they are being fashioned after, the old Soviet Empire.
So, while I am not supporting Rick Santorum the candidate here, I am defending him and damning his detractors.
John McCain doesn’t know dick about waterboarding.
