A few weeks ago, former Minnesota governor (and ex-Navy SEAL) Jesse Ventura appeared on Larry King Live, where he averred quite memorably that waterboarding is indeed torture:
This dandy of a quote was passed around the interwebs with predictable fervor. Then last week, Ventura appeared on The View and, when Elisabeth Hasselbeck pressed him on waterboarding, repeated many of the same points he had raised previously on Larry King. However, he also made this additional argument, which caught my attention:VENTURA: That's right. I was water boarded, so I know -- at SERE School, Survival Escape Resistance Evasion. It was a required school you had to go to prior to going into the combat zone, which in my era was Vietnam. All of us had to go there. We were all, in essence -- every one of us was water boarded. It is torture.
KING: What was it like?
VENTURA: It's drowning. It gives you the complete sensation that you are drowning. It is no good, because you -- I'll put it to you this way, you give me a water board, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I'll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.
“If waterboarding is OK, why don’t we let our police do it to suspects so they can learn what [the suspects] know?”Interesting point. So what is the answer?
It's hard to even entertain this idea, I think, because we know that police suspects will never be waterboarded. Still, the question remains: Is it fair to draw parallels between the interrogation of military detainees and suspects in police custody? Or does the distinction between the military and civilian justice systems render this an untenable comparison? Do our policing or legal scholars have any insight on this?
P.S. On a lighter note, I recall with fondness the year that Minnesota-bred Patch hosted the annual MSU-SCJ Halloween party wearing a (very convincing) Jesse Ventura costume. If only I had the photographic evidence! Maybe Pap, resident archivist, can help?
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2 comments:
Is this the same guy who is part of the "9-11 was in inside job" group? Yes, a former Gov. of a fine state who believes that our government blew up the World Trade Center. Suffice it is to say, I think is excessively tight wresting underpants killed a few brain cells when he was a professional wrestler.
I think that for the most part, the parallels to policing are largely misplaced although not totally. From this perspective, at least as it has been debated, water boarding and similar techniques have been proposed as extraordinarily extreme measures. When all else fails and there is a perception of an extraordinary threat, a strategy of last resorts. Now, I am not trying to open a debate is this true or not, merely as it has been presented. So, take the question from that perspective... By and large, local police rarely if ever encounter such situations. Even in cases where they are searching for the remains of a victim, the true "danger" per se is over.
Yet this is not completely without possibility that such a situation could emerge. Alan Dershowitz, that true right-wing nut, has proposed in the past the idea of "torture warrants" in extreme situations. His example is one where the police believe a suspect buried a child alive and that child has only 1 hour to live. The real moral question is should the police take extraordinary action in extraordinary circumstances. Relating to terrorism, if law enforcement has a suspect they believe knows when/where a “dirty bomb” is set to go off in LA or New York…should they use coercive techniques? Morally, ok, what if they get bad info? Is NO info any better? Generally such intelligence is not based on the need to prosecute someone per se but to offset a catastrophe. So, even assume that Gov. WackJob is right – should we sit back and wait…all the while telling the world how morally courageous we are while the child runs out of air.
As a side note, there was a great series on TBS called “Sleeper Cell” where the plot was a cell in the U.S. plotting to acquire and detonate a dirty bomb in LA. And this was the exact scenario when a suspect was caught…he refused to talk, they progressively used more and more coercive techniques. The suspect, who knew all the necessary facts, gave misleading intelligence the whole time. I have thought about this a lot…What other options so we have? At the end of the day, maybe Dershowitz is right? Frankly, our enemies could care less HOW we treat people.
Agreed Scooby....What the View producers where trying to do was add legitimacy to the anti-waterboarding agrument by having an ex-special forces guy talk about how bad it is. But couldn't all of Jesse's negativity to the method be directly related to his unhappiness with the Vietnam conflict? If he felt it was a righteous war, I bet he'd have a different take on that procedure.
What about other guys like Oliver North who had it done to him? He said he didn't consider it all that torturous----Very unpleasant though, yes.
I also believe the ex-governor was extremely condescending and combative toward Elizabeth on the view. His arguments were not off the cuff in the least....Just meant to pander to the crowd.....Especially when he's preaching to that ultra-liberal choir known as The View's audience.
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