Waterboarding Is No Surfboarding

Previously posted 11/15/11

Saturday’s CBS News/National Journal debate in South Carolina brought up some interesting facts about how the GOP candidates view personal liberties. We all know how they view abortion and anything related to women’s reproductive rights. Saturday brought out a new topic of interest: waterboarding.

President Obama has outright banned waterboarding as a form of interrogation sighting not only human rights violations but also the views of many top military officials who agree that waterboarding is a form of torture, and torture doesn’t make people sing.

Some of the most memorable comments include Hermain Cain’s support of “enhanced interrogation” techniques but didn’t specifically include waterboarding, which as everybody knows has been one of the most debated forms of said techniques. "I will trust the judgment of our military to determine what is torture and what is not torture," Cain said. Asked about waterboarding in particular, he replied, "I would return to that policy. I don't see it as torture, I see it as an enhanced interrogation technique" (Joshua Hersh, Huffington Post 11/14). As with almost all of the GOP “torture” and “enhanced interrogation” are not synonyms for one another, rather they are two completely separate entities.

Michelle Bachman made some very risqué comments concerning Obama’s oversight of the CIA. She told NBC’s “Meet The Press” that the President” is allowing the ACLU to run the CIA” in concerns to waterboarding (Huffington Post, 11/13). She argued in the debate that Obama’s ban on waterboarding was depriving our intelligence services from gaining needed information concerning the continued war on terrorism. And for all the times the GOP candidates have cited high-ranking military officials on topics such as these neither Cain nor Bachman ever mentioned the military’s thoughts on waterboarding.

Despite my Democratic, liberal views on politics I must applaud John Huntsman and Ron Paul on this topic. They were the only two candidates who are outspokenly against waterboarding. They both agree that it is not only a thoroughly ineffective form of interrogation but it also is detrimental to our country’s standing in the eyes of the world. "We diminish our standing in the world and the values that we project, which include liberty, democracy, human rights and open markets, when we torture," Huntsman said. "Waterboarding is torture. We shouldn't torture." (Joshua Hersh, Huffington Post, 11/13) Even Senator John McCain tweeted his dismay over the candidate’s views. “Very disappointed by statements at SC GOP debate supporting waterboarding. Waterboarding is torture.” (Rachel Weiner, Washington Post 11/14))

It seems that the GOP is not only the Party of the Rich (which will be discussed in a future post) but also the Party of Me Myself and I. They were willing to bring the country to its financial and economic knees just so they could give more money to themselves and the overly wealthy, without any concern for the rest of the country and its standing in the international market. If they were willing to do that, maybe we should all look more stringently at what our country may become if one of them becomes the leader of the world’s leading superpower.