Defining Torture Down

Newsweek's Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball report on President Obama's first-week executive orders pertaining to the treatment of detainees.

Writers notoriously don't get to write their own headlines, and it sometimes can be a problem. In this case, Isikoff and Hosenball have a real beef against the headline writer, or they should.

The article is called "The End of Torture" No joke. As if, until Obama's pen hit paper, American officials were routinely breaking kneecaps and playing with dentists' drills. Not to make light of a complicated situation, but this topic has been so twisted and distorted that it is no wonder America's reputation has suffered or that so many Americans believe the worst of their own government.

Abu Ghraib was one thing; even if you believe the abuses (A) were torture and (B) resulted from a too-loose interpretation of the law by people at the top, what happened there was nonetheless not ordered, not sanctions, and later punished.

The only officially sanctioned and practiced "enhanced interrogation technique" that may have risen to the level of torture was waterboarding. It is not my purpose to get into the debate right now about whether it did or did not constitute torture, except to say that the retroactive absolutism of the pundit class -- it was, no question about it, either according to US law or to universal morality! -- is not convincing.

Be that as it may, that technique was used three times, the last being in 2003, and was banned internally by the Bush administration in 2006. So, even if you think waterboarding is unquestionably torture, then the "end of torture" came in 2003, or at the latest 2006.

So what other practices does Obama's Executive Order end? According to the article, "temperature manipulation and stress positions," as well as "trick[ing] prisoners into believing they would face physical harm from foreign intelligence services if they didn't cooperate." Maybe these are very terrible things. But are they "torture" either under US law or in any reasonable person's definition?

To their credit, Isikoff and Hosenball only use the "t" word once, with the proper qualifier. But unfortunately, it's the headline and the first paragraph that will get the most attention -- such is the way with all stories -- and these will only serve to reinforce the calumny that under George W. Bush, torture became routine in America.