Commentary‘s Abe Greenwald is Pro-Torture

I had the opportunity over Passover to reflect a bit on the humanitarian tradition in Jewish thought. And then of course there’s Commentary where Abe Greenwald defends himself against charges of being pro-torture with the quip “anything to which Christopher Hitchens is willing to submit himself in pursuit of a Vanity Fair article is not torture. This covers, among other things, back-waxing, exercise class, and waterboarding.”

Over at the Wonk Room, Matt Duss reminds us that Hitchens’ conclusion after having been waterboarded was that “if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.”

As Jay Bybee wrote in a memo that concluded that waterboarding is legal, “You have orally informed us that this procedure triggers an automatic physiological sensation of drowning that the individual cannot control even though he may be aware that he is in fact not drowning.” Basically the idea is that if you would like to torture someone by holding them under water until they nearly drown, but your lawyer tells you that you’re not allowed to run the risk doing permanent physical harm to the torturee, “waterboarding” is a nifty method of producing all the relevant torture but without the chance of accidentally drowning the guy you’re torturing. The only reason anyone could ever reach the conclusion that this isn’t torture is that they (a) want to torture people, and (b) don’t want to admit that they want to torture people. Since Bybee, along with George W. Bush and other Bush administration officials, wanted to torture people but didn’t want to face the legal consequences of admitting that they were torturing people, the sophistry makes perfect sense. It’s not entirely clear to me why Greenwald feels the need to follow suit — he can just shout loud and proud that he likes torture.