Editorial: Weapon of shame in war on terror

To  take a man, blindfold him, strap him to a board and pour water into his mouth and nose - preferably through cloth to encourage the sensation he is both drowning and being smothered - is clearly torture. Unless, that is, you are President George W Bush or one of his acolytes. Then it is a "specialised interrogation procedure" and a vital weapon in the war on terror, The Dominion Post writes.

Until the advent of the Bush administration, the United States did not seem to have any trouble in knowing that waterboarding was wrong. In 1947 a Japanese officer who had waterboarded an American civilian in World War II was sentenced to 15 years hard labour. An American soldier who supervised its use in the Vietnam War was court martialled. A Texas sheriff and his deputies who found it a useful way to extract confessions from prisoners were sent to prison for four years.

That a US president should now consider it acceptable hints at a mind more in step with the Spanish Inquisition - where the procedure was pioneered - than with a 21st century liberal democracy. In vetoing legislation that would have made it unequivocally clear that waterboarding was not to be used by CIA interrogators, Mr Bush has shamed both himself and his nation.

He has also hurt his own and American interests. As many commentators have pointed out, Britain, its closest ally, and the United Nations human rights commissioner both consider waterboarding to be torture, and to be illegal under international law. In advocating its use, Mr Bush is instead putting the US on a par with other regimes which have deemed waterboarding to be an acceptable tool of state policy. In relatively recent times that has included the Khmer Rouge and various South American military dictatorships. It is hard to argue for any sort of moral authority when that is the company you are keeping, or that the same cannot now be done to Americans who fall into enemy hands.

Nor is there conclusive evidence it works. An American subjected to water torture by the Japanese told of "lying just to stop the torture".

A report prepared in 2006 by experts advising US intelligence agencies on interrogation techniques argued the harsh techniques used since 2001 were unreliable, outdated and amateurish. Some of those experts pointed to US interrogations of German and Japanese prisoners in World War II, which had gathered information without coercion.

In the end all that is irrelevant. Even if the US could be confident that waterboarding would yield it the information it wanted, it would not be acceptable.

The US acknowledges it has used waterboarding on three detainees - the man identified as the September 11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and al Qaeda operatives Abu Zubaida and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Those men are almost certainly guilty of deliberately waging war on civilians, an act of evil for which they deserve the most severe of punishments.

However, that does not mean they should be tortured, and that is what was done to them when they were waterboarded.

President Bush should not need a law to tell him that, nor to tell him that it is something that civilised countries and civilised people do not do.