Bringing Torture to Life

One of the questions posed during the YouTube/CNN Republican debates last week asked whether or not waterboarding is torture. Senator McCain definitively stated it is torture and the US should choose to take the "higher ground" and not participate in the practice of any form of torture. Romney, on the other hand, made the embarrassing remark that it was to the disadvantage of the US to even discuss interrogation techniques thereby sidestepping the question all together. I wonder how his prayers to his God can lead him to give such a non-committal and harmful statement. Harmful because in his non answer he more or less said to the world that this is not a moral issue, a human rights issue of value to be met head on. By not discussing it it does not exist. By not giving waterboarding shape or sound Romney fails to bring it to life and it remains a hypothetical method of interrogation and not a formalized technique currently used to deliberately induce human trauma.

If anyone questions whether or not waterboarding is torture then maybe we should look at it another way. I don't like to check the news on CNN but every now and then I do despite the sorrow it brings me. It seems that almost every time I do I find a story about a child who was beaten to death. Just the other day I read about a little girl whose head was repeatedly dunked in a bathroom tub for not saying "thank you". I would guess that most Americans would agree that deliberately submerging a child's head in a tub of water to elicit a particular response from her would be deemed torture and not just an unusually austere method of discipline. If it is considered a form of inhumane treatment (torture) for the toddler then it must certainly be deemed torture for any man or woman held in captivity. We should be horrified by the treatment of this child and equally as outraged for any human subjected to such intentional cruelty.