Waterboarding – or “The Way I Can Show How Big My Balls Are on TV”
I purposely don’t get into political debates on this forum, but I’ve grown a little weary of the current debate surrounding waterboarding and torture, as if the entire discussion was a referendum on who’s going to be “tougher” on terrorism. Today, the director of the CIA said he’d never allow his men to waterboard. From that came a bunch of talking heads opining about his comments – none of whom have ever heard a shot fired in anger, and all of whom seem to believe that being savage is, in some way, helpful to our national goals.
I’ve watched the waterboarding debate for months now, and I honestly think it shows a glaring lack of knowledge on the purpose of the technique. Succinctly, it’s designed to gather information, period. We didn’t do it because someone flew a plane into the twin towers, and we shouldn’t use it in the future because ISIS is lopping off heads. We don’t use enhanced interrogation techniques to be “tough”, which is something apparently lost on the current crop of political candidates. The entire discussion is bordering on the Twilight Zone.
In an interview, Donald Trump, the current front-runner, maintains that we “can’t win against ISIS” because they “drown people in cages and cut off heads”, and our hands are tied because we don’t use the same tactics. I watched that interview and wondered, what have we become? This idea is patently false and absolutely shows a complete lack of knowledge of the decisions a commander in chief should make. Ramping up our savagery will in no way increase our ability to defeat ISIS. All it will do is drag us into the gutter with them.
Every single time I hear someone say this – and make no mistake, it’s not just Trump – the first thing I want to ask is, “Will you hold the bucket? Will you pull out the fingernails? Will you place the electrodes?” Before you think I’m exaggerating what candidates have said, remember this: Trump’s said repeatedly he would do “a hell of a lot worse” than waterboarding. And then he always backs up his assertion with the atrocities that ISIS does, as if that justifies it. Which is ridiculous.
We didn’t used enhanced interrogation techniques because we wanted revenge. We wanted information. Period. I’m honestly still unsure in my own mind where I stand on the specific technique of waterboarding, as applied, because I know the extreme controls that were used to ensure the safety of the detainee. However, I will say, I still have my doubts – and by the way, I’m sick of the trope about “We do it to our own SOF forces. How bad can it be?” excuse. I have been through several different SERE schools, one of them the harshest and at the pinnacle of SOF. I have never been waterboarded. I’m not saying it’s never happened, just that it’s not something that “every SOF guy” goes through like the news would have you believe. Using ANY technique because the “other side did” is tantamount to admitting you have no idea how to win, and are participating in a tit-for-tat because you have no idea what serious military strategy entails. It’s literally like devolving into a gang-war between drug dealers and shows a strategic skill at the same level.
According to Trump, we can’t win against ISIS because we won’t lower ourselves to its savagery. Maybe he’d like to behead some people, I don’t know, but the notion is steeped in stupidity. He asks his massive rallies if Patton or MacArthur were alive now, how long would ISIS exist, implying that there are no military men today of their caliber. I have a news flash for him: We defeated the Nazi machine and the Japanese imperial army without resorting to their inhumane tactics.
According to Trump’s current doctrine, there is no way we could have won World War II unless we’d created our own gas chambers and flushed all of the German soldiers we’d captured through them. Or maybe we should have beheaded or burned alive every Japanese soldier we captured like they did to us. Can you imagine him running against Roosevelt in 1944? “We aren’t winning! We should be gassing every single German we catch! We can’t win this war unless we reduce the playing field to their level. We are TOO SOFT!” That isn’t hyperbole. It’s almost exactly what he said in an interview on ISIS. He literally thinks that because we don’t torture, ISIS is going home and “laughing at us.” It is the most ludicrous thing I have ever seen. Luckily, we didn’t have Trump in 1944. And when we were done, the defeated nations allowed us to work with them precisely because we were viewed as fair and just.
War isn’t based on a tit-for-tat response, and defeating ISIS has absolutely nothing to do with the level of savagery we can perpetuate against captured individuals, using a justification that they did the same. Nothing. Well, there is something. The people a president orders do such things are forever damaged. Of course, as the president is far removed from such action, he doesn’t have to deal with the fallout. Only the adulation from a bunch of other people far removed from the battlefield.
If you are one of the one’s cheering this doctrine, if you think that torturing terrorists is within our values, and wish it to happen, then by all means, go to the nearest recruiting station and sign up as an interrogator. You’ll be able to get your Johnny Jihad on at will if one of the one’s espousing this doctrine is elected. If you’re not willing to do so, like this guy, then don’t force it on another who only wants to serve a country with values enshrined by our founding fathers.
The problem with torture is that you never know if the guy you’ve caught is, in fact, Doctor Evil. You suspect it, but you don’t know. There have been plenty of times when captured ‘insurgents’ have actually been innocent. If the people espousing this doctrine had their way, we’d have tortured the hell out of them just because they happened to be on the battlefield. And before you accuse me of extending Trump’s doctrine – HE is the one who says it. He’s the one that says we should go “much worse”, not based on collection of information, but solely based on what activities our enemy chooses to use. He clearly doesn’t understand – or care – that on the battlefield, you don’t know what you don’t know. According to him, this guy from the Boston bombings would have been under the knife. Luckily, he wasn’t. Because you figure that out through interrogation – not torture.
Winning a war isn’t predicated on what atrocities you can inflict on the population based on what the other side does. Warfare is much more complex, and creating a platform of torture, as a method of success – to me – is something making me glad I retired from the military. All the candidates claim to support the veteran, without even realizing the damage they’re doing to the entire military with their wild boasts. I served in the finest military on earth – and that military wasn’t the finest based on satellites, tanks or ballistic missiles. It was based on values and a moral compass I was proud to uphold.
The next guy that enlists will not. He’ll be told that the intrinsic values espoused by our founding fathers don’t matter, that our very founding documents don’t matter, and that whatever the enemy does is how we’ll conduct ourselves. In essence, we’ll sacrifice our own moral code to the enemy we’re fighting based on an idiotic notion that such savagery should subsume rational strategic thought.
Guess what? It won’t help one iota in winning a war.
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