White House Defends Waterboarding

After having danced around the issue for years, the White House has finally admitted that it did use torture. In an astonishing statement, the White House Press officer, Tony Fratto, asserted that that the CIA had used waterboarding in the past and may use the technique again in the future.

As far as can be traced, waterboarding is a technique first employed by the Inquisition in Spain to force confessions from converted Jews and others who were suspected of not being true Christians. The prisoner’s face is pushed down into water and he or she begins to choke as the victim gasps for air. Those who have experienced the technique have no doubt that it constitutes torture.

Some have thought that the technique had ceased to be used by agencies of the United States government but that that the reason for not condemning it was that the administration wanted to insure that CIA agents who had used waterboarding in their interrogations in the past would not be prosecuted, now it turns out that the reason for not condemning its use is that the government would like to keep waterboarding in its arsenal of interrogation techniques.

President Bush has often said that he approves of harsh interrogation techniques. Prisoners have complained about a variety of abuses: enforced nudity, sensory deprivation, conditions of excessive cold and heat, the lack of sanitary facilities causing prisoners to lie amidst their own feces and uring, constant exposure to artificial light and noise and desecration of religious materials and religious rites. Prisoners who have organized hunger strikes to protest their conditions have been cruelly force fed. Many prisoners have attempted suicide and some have been driven temporarily or permanently insane.

The use of torture was outlawed by the international community in reaction to the horrors perpetrated by the Nazi and Fascist regimes before and during the Second World War.