Indigo Lantern

Is waterboarding torture?

This has been the subject of debate in the United States in recent years.

Those who argue that waterboarding is not torture explain that it is actually an “enhanced interrogation technique”. Here is an ABC News article from 2005 describing enhanced interrogation techniques. And here is a 2007 article from the Britain’s newspaper The Independent about whether waterboarding is actually torture.

Those who argue that waterboarding is torture point to the fact that the experience is dangerous and traumatic, with potentially very long-lasting physical and psychological effects.

I believe waterboarding is torture. But that is not the point of this post. Instead, the point of this post is that waterboarding is a euphemism, and one that we would do better not to use.

Linguists have often argued in the press against the use of euphemisms, which they depict as a linguistic means of circumventing or refashioning public policy. For example, “detainees” instead of prisoners; “enhanced interrogation techniques” instead of torture; “collateral damage” for killing civilians; etc.

Creating terms or phrases to recast an activity or event obfuscates the truth for political purpose. If a person who is captured and kept against his or her will is a “detainee” rather than a “prisoner”, then the captors ostensibly don’t have to follow the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war.

I would argue that when we use the term waterboarding, we are colluding in this obfuscation. If you read descriptions of waterboarding, you will learn that it is a process of drowning someone. Since the purpose of torture is to get someone to talk, the process is stopped before the victim actually drowns so that they can spill the beans.

Now, if you were to go swimming and were to get too tired to swim, you might drown. That would be an accidental death.

If you were to go swimming and someone were to hold your head under water until you died, that would be murder.

Essentially, waterboarding is interrupted murder. It is not “simulated” drowning: the victim’s lungs do get filled with water. There is no simulation there. If your lungs are filled with water, it’s not like drowning. It is drowning. And drowning another person on purpose is murder. To begin the process of murdering someone, whether by drowning or by any other means, that is torture.

When we use euphemisms like “harsh interrogation techniques” or even “waterboarding”, we are like the crowds amassed to watch the emperor parading his new clothes. Remember, the sly thieves posing as tailors said the property of the cloth they were weaving was that only fools and those unfit for their jobs couldn’t see the cloth. No one wanted to speak up and declare the emperor was naked for fear of losing their job or being ridiculed.

It’s the same situation now. We are pretending the emperor has clothes on when he doesn’t.

Torture is torture. Waterboarding is torture. Torture is wrong. Waterboarding is wrong. The emperor has no clothes.