LauraW put up a post at AoSHQ concerning Steven Harrigan’s waterboarding on Fox News. This prompted a discussion about coercive interrogation policies and the legality, humanity, and efficacy of waterboarding in particular. As usual there is an enormous gulf between the liberal and conservative viewpoints, so some time ago I prepared a chart that showed their relative positions.
The first chart below shows my personal ranking of coercive interrogation techniques by the degree of mental and physical stress experienced by the prisoner. This chart is a rough draft and is intended to be a starter point for discussion. I have never interrogated anybody nor been interrogated by anybody, so I have no special knowledge to bring to this ranking. In fact I probably have less knowledge than most people (I had to Google up lists of torture methods, many of which I had never heard). And of course the degrees of stress experienced will vary by circumstance. So I’m entirely open to constructive suggestions as to corrections or improvements.
So given this qualitative rating of various methods, where do the two viewpoints lie? I can’t claim familiarity with the liberal position, but it seems to me that they are unhappy with every technique on the chart. So I’ve plotted their zone of approval on the chart below (click to make it bigger) as the small blue (purple) triangle in the left corner. Conservatives are more tolerant of mental stress than physical stress, and accept extreme discomfort (exhaustion, cold,s stress positions) as acceptable means of lowering a detainee’s resistance level. Their zone of approval is the larger red (pinkish) quadrilateral in the lower left quadrant.
It is difficult to resolve the question of appropriate levels of harshness when the semantic gulf between the left and the right doesn’t allow a common definition of the word “torture.” It is clear to me, at least, that by the traditional usage of the word, conservatives do not approve of torture. Per the colloquial liberal usage, however, anything beyond simple questioning of the detainees is deemed torture. This has led to rhetorical excess on both sides, with little productive discussion.
Posted by geoff 