Waterboarding has come up a lot in class and I didn't really understand what it was, so I looked it up on wikipedia (where else, right?). Then I followed a link in a footnote to this site. It features a video of a reporter voluntarily being waterboarded and his discussion with a professional interrogator and two faculty members at Harvard. It reminded me of Bruce Hoffman's piece "A Nasty Business" where he talks with a counter-terrorism worker who has engaged in coercive methods of interrogation. The interrogator says that he doesn't feel good or bad about what he's done and that no one really knows what they'd do in a position like that until he or she is actually in the moment.
In this video clip, the interviewed interrogator--Mike Ritz--says he has to make decisions between saving people and punishing alleged terrorists. I found his point interesting about torture: when torture is used and innocent would-be-victims are saved as a result, people are left with two conflicting beliefs (that torture is illegal and bad, and that saving people is good) that they have to reconcile. This video furthers our discussion on Hoffman's piece about torture being horrible but sometimes having good effects. However, unsurprisingly, it doesn't resolve the issue.
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