Reason Online muddles waterboarding

Cathy Young waded into the waterboarding debate over at Reason Online recently.

My series of posts on waterboarding have argued that the media have served us rather poorly regarding the debate. Young falls somewhat short of providing the antidote.

Young starts by calling the detainee treatment issue the most contentious of President Obama's young presidency. That declaration may be premature given the burgeoning controversy over the economic stimulus package, but Young made me chuckle with her assertion that Democrats found Obama's move to close Gitmo in a year "Lincolnesque." Would that be the same Lincoln who suspended Habeas corpus during the Civil War to make things tougher on Southern sympathizers?

That historical gaffe aside--perhaps it can be pinned on the Democrats to whom Young refers--Young sets forth a reasonable proposition: that the issue is more complicated than either partisan extreme lets on.

But a few paragraphs later, Young perhaps oversimplifies the issue:

Semantic hair-splitting aside, waterboarding is torture. It has been widely recognized as such for a long time—specifically, by the United States when committed by oppressive foreign regimes. It is also difficult to argue in good faith that exposure to extreme cold and heat or being chained in a painfully contorted position are not torture or its moral equivalent.

Young's claim that waterboarding is a recognized form of torture based on past conflicts probably stems from the type of flawed research that The Columbia Journal of Transnational Law published in an essay by Evan Wallach. Wallach's essay brims with equivocal language respecting waterboarding, as numerous approaches to simulated drowning all get similarly characterized. Forced aspiration of water or even seawater repeatedly over a period of hours is clearly quite different from the waterboarding technique used by the CIA, even if there are some similarities as well. Drawing the easy-yet-inaccurate comparisons as Young does is the wrong way to approach the debate. That's assuming that one desires an honest debate, of course.

But I like the way Young wrapped up her column.

Obama's statement in his inaugural speech that "we reject the false choice between our safety and our ideals" was a noble sentiment. Yet there is a certain arrogance in the assertion that we can balance safety and idealism with no difficult compromises - and it seems that, in practice, Obama is well aware of the need for such compromises.

I hope she's right.