Clive Crooks says waterboarding may not be torture

A couple of thoughts about an article in The Atlantic by Clive Crook The Piece is entitled More on Torture prosecutions and is dated 29th April 2009.

The article is a follow up to a piece by the same author and he precis the original thus:

(a) Possibly, torture can succeed in extracting vital information.
(b) On balance, however, torture does not make the US safer.
(c) In any event, it is shameful and wrong.
(d) Waterboarding is torture in the ordinary meaning of the word.
(e) Notwithstanding (d), the law is not as clear as it should be on whether waterboarding as practised during the Bush administration is torture under the law.
(f) Congress could and should have outlawed waterboarding explicitly already. It should do so now.
(g) Because of (e), and because the issue is so acutely divisive in the US, prosecutions under the existing law may serve neither the cause of justice nor the public interest.

Most of these points are fair, other than (e) that is. E is a steaming pile of crap. There is no dispute, the law is settled, both federally and internationally, waterboarding is torture. I would love to see how the author finesses things so that waterboarding Cheney/Bush style is more of a gray area than waterboarding any other style.

Also, any legal opinion that says waterboarding is OK comes in the form of memo’s from the Bush / Cheney legal petting zoo from the likes of Yoo. The strange thing is that the author acknowledges this point but still stands by his guns. The Nixonian “If the president does it is is automatically legal” absurdity seems to completely bypass him.

The article then wanders off into different territory with this:

As this leader in the FT notes, what matters most here is not to put George W. Bush and his team in jail, or to try them and then pardon them. It is to guard against such measures being used again.

Don’t suppose it occurs to the author, or the FT for that matter, that the two outcomes posited are not mutually exclusive. If Bush and his cronies go to jail this might just make the next overreaching moron who inhabits the Whitehouse think twice about going outside existing law.

The piece concludes with a swipe at an Henry Farrell of Crooked timber, not a well reasoned argument against the author’s writing but rather an unfocused, petty, personal attack.

The offending paragragh was this one;

One last thing. I wanted to draw attention to a blogpost attacking my column by Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber. He says: “This piece on how (a) we shouldn’t do waterboarding on pragmatic grounds but (b) it isn’t really torture, is reprehensible.

Sounds fair to me but not to the thin skinned Mr Crook who states:

This remark is abusive, of course, but that is business as usual. What makes it interesting in a professional scholar and writer on a leading blog is its remarkable incompetence–or, perhaps, its total lack of good faith. I ask you to read the column, or review my summary of it above, and ask yourself how any fair-minded intelligent person could distil my position to those two points.

Abusive? Oh come on, that doesn’t even scratch the surface of abusive, Farrell is taking a perfectly legitimate shot at Crook’s first column. A shot, incidentally, that is spot on in my humble opinion. So calling a piece of writing by the thin skinned Brooks reprehensible is abuse but waterboarding is not necessarily torture. Interesting values and logic system at play here.

The thing that frightens me most is the fact that our side of the argument i.e. Torture is always wrong and the guilty should be prosecuted. waterboarding is undeniably torture therefore anyone involved with waterboarding should be prosecuted always seems to lose out to people who use fundamentally flawed reasoning and history like Clive Crooks.