Historicizing waterboarding as a severe torture norm
| Published date | 01 December 2018 |
| Author | Rory Cox |
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117818774396 |
| Date | 01 December 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117818774396
International Relations
2018, Vol. 32(4) 488 –512
© The Author(s) 2018
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0047117818774396
journals.sagepub.com/home/ire
Historicizing waterboarding as
a severe torture norm
Rory Cox
University of St Andrews
Abstract
The debate on waterboarding and the wider debate on torture remains fiercely contested.
President Trump and large sections of the US public continue to support the use of waterboarding
and other so-called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ as part of the ‘War on Terror’, thus
putting the anti-torture norm under pressure. This article demonstrates that the re-imagining of
waterboarding as ‘torture-lite’ is contradicted by the long history of waterboarding itself. Examining
pre-modern uses and descriptions of torture and waterboarding, this article highlights that the
post-2001 identification of waterboarding as a relatively benign interrogation technique radically
inverts a norm that has predominated for over 600 years. This historical norm unequivocally
identifies waterboarding not only as torture but as severe torture. The article highlights the value
of historically contextualizing attitudes to torture, reviews how and why waterboarding was
downgraded by the Bush Administration, reveals the earliest explicit description of waterboarding
from 1384, and argues that the twenty-first-century re-imagining of waterboarding as torture-lite
is indicative of the fragility of the anti-torture norm.
Keywords
anti-torture norm, CIA, comparative ethics, legal history, torture, torture-lite, waterboarding
Among the American political elite, support for waterboarding and other so-called
enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) waned after 2009, when President Obama
stated, ‘I believe that waterboarding was torture … whatever legal rationales were used,
it was a mistake’.1 In contrast, American public support for torture, including water-
boarding, has increased steadily since 2001.2 Polls from 2009 and 2011 indicate that over
70 percent of the US public believe that torture can be justified in exceptional circum-
stances.3 Even after the 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee Report categorically estab-
lished that EITs had not been effective in detainee interrogations, US public opinion
Corresponding author:
Rory Cox, University of St Andrews, 69-71 South Street, St Andrews, Fife KY16 9QW, UK.
Email: rwscc@st-andrews.ac.uk
774396IRE0010.1177/0047117818774396International RelationsCox
research-article2018
Article
Cox 489
maintained that torture generated ‘valuable intelligence’ and supported its use ‘by almost
2-1 margins’.4 In comparison to global averages, Americans are more likely to believe
that torture is ‘part of war’ and that enemy combatants ‘can be tortured to obtain impor-
tant military information’.5
The debate on waterboarding and the wider debate on torture remains fiercely con-
tested. The 2016 presidential campaign and election of Donald Trump reignited the con-
troversy over the employment of coercive interrogation by US intelligence agencies and
armed forces. Trump appealed to and fostered an underlying public support for water-
boarding during his 2016 campaign, promising that he would ‘bring back a hell of a lot
worse than waterboarding’,6 and urging that ‘waterboarding is absolutely fine but we
should go much further’.7 Responding to the June 2016 Istanbul airport bombing, Trump
announced, ‘I like it [waterboarding] a lot. I don’t think it’s tough enough’. The reason
for this, he explained, is that ‘We’re living in medieval times … We have to fight so
viciously and violently because we’re dealing with violent people, vicious people’.8
Trump’s election as president indicates that many Americans approve of such statements
or are simply indifferent to the US government’s employment of waterboarding.
Trump’s invocation of ‘medieval times’ as a synonym for viciousness and violence
taps into widespread perceptions of medieval society as singularly barbaric and cruel;
often posed in contrast to “enlightened” modernity.9 This construct of the Middle Ages
includes assumptions about the widespread and almost casual use of torture, with torture
being the ‘most notorious aspect of medieval culture and society’.10 However, as will be
shown, medieval attitudes regarding torture were far from simplistic and waterboarding
was clearly categorized as a form of torture as early as the fourteenth century. Premodern
evidence can therefore act as a corrective to modern attempts to reimagine waterboard-
ing as ‘torture-lite’. In downgrading waterboarding as a non-torturous interrogation tech-
nique, the Bush administration – and now potentially the Trump administration
– permitted a practice that was openly recognized as torture during the Middle Ages.
Thus, ‘violent’ medieval society is revealed to be more cautious in its approach to water-
boarding than post-9/11 America.
Whether President Trump will seek to fulfill his election promise and reinstitute
waterboarding remains to be seen – there are certainly obstacles in his path.11 Attorney
General Jeff Sessions reversed his former approval of waterboarding during his January
2017 Senate Confirmation Hearing, asserting that waterboarding was now ‘absolutely
improper and illegal’.12 Former CIA Director (now Secretary of State) Mike Pompeo
asserted that he would ‘absolutely not’ authorize interrogation techniques not approved
by the US Army Field Manual.13 Regardless, President Trump has restated his approval
of waterboarding, asserting that ‘we have to fight fire with fire’.14
The willingness to justify waterboarding goes hand-in-hand with its characterization
as ‘torture-lite’: unpleasant, but not real torture and not illegal. This phrase can be found
throughout academic literature and the popular media.15 Arguably, increased media
exposure has desensitized the public to torture and eroded moral sensibilities.16 The now
open acknowledgment that waterboarding was occasionally incorporated into US armed
forces Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training has encouraged a pub-
lic impression of waterboarding as something less severe than torture.17 Public percep-
tion that military personnel have been routinely waterboarded feeds a belief that (a)
To continue reading
Request your trial