A contribution from Mike Walker, USMC Colonel, retired
Reflections on water boarding
Let me begin by stating that as Marine who served as an intelligence officer, in peace and war, active and reserve, for over a decade, I have not in the past and do not now support the torture of prisoners.
But I am deeply disturbed by the attempts of people who should know better to put the defense of our nation ahead of a poorly thought out and largely partisan political action on this subject.
Criminalizing policy differences is to follow a path that is destructive, unpredictable, and, in the end, uncontrollable. It is a weapon that will as assuredly destroy those who wield it as the targets aimed at.
I am a witness to “torture” as many are defining it as a young Marine infantry officer. Here is how I recall it.
When we captured an officer, we turned them over to the interrogators. The prisoner was stripped, blindfolded, and held out of doors in a large chicken coop. The weather was cold, coming close to freezing at night. Questioning began inside a barn with the still naked and blindfolded prisoner having his hands tied and his arms stretched over his head by means of rope tied to his wrists and hung over a rafter.
If the prisoner did not satisfactorily respond to the questions he was brought outside and staked down to the ground at his hands and feet as well as on either side of his head so he could not move it. A towel was then placed over his face and five-gallon water cans were lined up. If the prisoner gave an unsatisfactory answer then water was poured continuously over the towel making breathing very difficult if not impossible. The prisoner was instructed to grab the nearby trouser leg of an interrogator with his staked hand when he wished to provide a satisfactory answer. It worked very well. The interrogators said it worked on everybody except some SEALS who they claimed were half fish.
The interrogators always had an Army medic nearby and as the procedures became more severe they would consult back to the rear on how far too go via a satellite link run by some Army Ranger communicators. In the actual event, the medic was never needed.
This happened almost thirty years ago in the Piedmont region of western North Carolina. The recipients of the water boarding were U.S. Army officers trying to qualify for the Special Forces who had been captured by us. This all occurred during the Robin Sage Exercise conducted by the U.S. Army Institute for Military Assistance (now the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center). The President of the United States at that time was Jimmy Carter. I can only wonder how long water boarding has been around.
So what exactly is torture? I can’t begin to answer that. The water boarding I witnessed was pretty harsh stuff and I have no problem with the “higher ups” making an official call that it is torture and not to do it.
But to listen to others, everyone who lived in a dorm in college in my generation was a victim of systemic torture either by omission or commission at the hands of the heads of the universities and colleges. The colleges, so this line of reasoning goes, created a culture causing widespread and continuous sleep deprivation due to the playing of loud music (in college dorms). Employees (Professors) routinely tortured students by assigning workloads that caused repeated sleepless periods known as “all nighters,” especially during final examination periods.
And for all my fellow grunts who served in the infantry, virtually your entire existence, in peace or war, was and/or is one long, endless program of CRIMINAL torture as these folks define it.
Now some may say that the college and infantry examples above are absurd and silly distractions. I only wish it were so. If we put prisoners through the rigors typical to infantry training it could be a CRIMINAL act under these fatally flawed definitions of torture. If we actually repeated the noise, lack of sleep, and time-pressure demands put to a college freshman then that treatment could result in CRIMINAL charges as some are now defining torture.
If I can’t figure out what is torture then I also cannot understand what are the goals here. Why is this a selective and backwards looking prosecution? Clearly, it has international implications so how long will the allegations be out there? What is our policy in that regard?
Should we be petitioning the heads of Peoples Republic of China and the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea for a truth commission to go over the torture and illegal execution of U.S. prisoners in the 1950’s? Should we be petitioning the head of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam for a truth commission to go over the torture and illegal execution of U.S. prisoners in the 1960’s and 1970’s?
Torture is torture, right? Does anyone not understand what happens to American prisoners captured in Iraq and Afghanistan? It is unspeakable torture followed by beheading or some other barbaric execution. What are all these champions against torture proposing to do about that? Certainly the Congress must value at least equally the fate of an American as that of an enemy? If you torture U.S. prisoners we will never stop until justice is done seems to be a missing component in this policy. Do we not want to send that message as well?
When you look at this “torture” morass one point stands out, our policies (past, present, and proposed) are confusing, contradictory, and to a large degree, self-defeating. On the one hand, it now appears that there is no atrocity carried out by our enemy that will cause a collective cry of outrage, condemnation, and action within a civilized legal framework. On the other hand, it appears there is no hardship, no matter how small, endured by a prisoner in U.S. hands that will not evoke immediate approbation and condemnation as torture.
We have created the worst of all possible worlds, a world where the word “torture” is now meaningless. We have enemy that can torture without fear of any meaningful legal consequences and we have Americans who are unjustly tarred with the term by a definition that only an idiot could concoct. And it is our men and women in uniform who will pay the ultimate price for these feckless actions.
Semper Fi,
Mike
