“I would bring back waterboarding, and I’d bring a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.”
Saturday night at the latest Republic primary debate, Donald Trump announced his whole-hearted support for waterboarding and more.
Despite the fact that it is considered torture by the United Nations, an uncountable number of legal experts, military judges, veterans and intelligence officers, Trump thinks that waterboarding is necessary— even beyond necessary. He sounded pretty excited about bringing the old torture band back together.
As a humanist, I believe that humans have and deserve some inalienable rights. Even evil humans, even humans who kill people and even humans who want to do great harm to the masses have some rights. This includes the right to life and the right to not receive cruel and unusual treatment or punishment.
Of course, waterboarding isn’t a punishment. It’s a way to extract confessions and interrogate. For those not in the know, waterboarding is a form of torture where water is poured over a cloth that is covering a victim’s face causing the sensation of drowning. It is painful, and can cause a myriad of physical effects—some of which are irreversible.
This is before we delve into the fact that waterboarding isn’t consistently effective.
Waterboarding has proven itself successful at getting confessions. Unfortunately, these confessions have an equal chance of being true or false. After hours, days, weeks or months of torture, a person will say basically anything to get it to stop. Waterboarding is an effective way to get people to say something, but not always the truth.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence wrote 6,700 pages of information after reading through hundreds of reports and could not prove that any information provided by waterboarding prevented any attacks or saved any lives. Again, you get something out of waterboarding, but it’s usually lies or a power trip from the man holding the water.
Trump wants to bring this back—and more. This is a candidate that is doing really well among evangelicals, the same people who often claim that the United States is in a state of moral decay. The same people who rally against and protest equality and abortion don’t care about actual human lives that are being abused and mistreated in the name of security.
Even if waterboarding were effective 100 percent of the time, I could not morally support it. A candidate who supports barbaric practices is the kind of candidate who leads us into war, who has no respect for the lives of our citizens, let alone respect for the lives of anyone else.
Trump isn’t pro-life or just. He’s another war-mongerer who talks big game about doing the inhumane like it’s justice instead of tragedy. His brand of disgusting isn’t new, it just sells well.
