By Giles Fraser
Church Times, November 30, 2007
It was called “tortura del agua” by the Spanish Inquisition. The Nazis used it, as did the Japanese and the Vietcong. We now call it waterboarding, and all reasonable people would also call it torture. That is, except — because it is a technique now widely practised by the CIA, and because the United States wants to claim that it does not torture prisoners — that the current US administration calls it an “enhanced interrogation technique”. Once again, Mr Bush’s dodgy dictionary finds new ways to lie.
This is waterboarding. First, the victim is trussed up, often strapped on to a board, facing the ceiling. The board is then angled so that the head is set slightly lower than the body. Things are scarier when they happen upside down. A rag is stuffed into the subject’s mouth, filling the cavity. The nostrils are blocked. Very slowly, a few drops at a time, the rag is saturated with filthy water. The subject starts fighting for breath, sucking in what little air there is available through the rag. Increasingly, he inhales more water than air and his lungs begin to fill up.
Another version involves water and cellophane wrapped around the head. There will be no tell-tale marks of torture, no scars or bruises. Wrapped in cellophane, or drowning with a rag down your throat, it is not even possible to scream.
Of course waterboarding is torture. In 1947, the United States charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for carrying out waterboarding on a US civilian. So why are the CIA not being charged with war crimes, 60 years on? Apparently, these are special circumstances. The war on terror justifies “enhanced interrogation techniques”. The bad guys must be stopped, at any cost. Only thus will Americans be able to sleep safe and well. So goes the argument, such as it is.
This is what makes the war on terror such a well of moral evil. Americans are fed a constant diet of fear about the outside world. Many of them do not have passports. Local newspapers and TV channels think the story of the local dog caught in a tree is more newsworthy than thousands dead in a faraway land. Full of anxiety, they lock themselves up in gated communities and vote for the toughest talk on the market, even if it comes from amoral politicians who go to prayer breakfasts and defend war crimes.
I love the United States, but its moral conscience has been diseased by the war on terror. It is now time for American churches to speak out more clearly.
The Revd Dr Giles Fraser is Team Rector of Putney.
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