Tom Ridge: Waterboarding Is Torture

Tom Ridge, the first ever secretary of the Homeland Security Department, has said what is obvious to the rest of the world - even if some Republicans find it hard to get their head around it - waterboarding is torture.

It's hard to think of anything that has done more to damage the US's standing in the world in recent years - even including horrors like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib - than the sight of some Republicans indulging in immoral semantic discussions about whether drowning someone might or might not be considered torture.

So it's very welcome to hear a former member of this corrupt administration speak in such clear terms against a practice that few us, before the Bush government, could ever have imagined Americans not only practicing, but in some cases publicly defending.

"There's just no doubt in my mind - under any set of rules - waterboarding is torture," Tom Ridge said Friday in an interview with the Associated Press.

"And I believe, unlike others in the administration, that waterboarding was, is - and will always be - torture. That's a simple statement."

What's astonishes me here isn't that he actually said it, but that so few Republicans have found it in themselves to condemn such a foul practice.

In fairness McCain and a few others have also spoken out against this barbaric practice, especially when confronting Giuliani over his ludicrous claims that it would depend on how waterboarding was done and by whom before he could state whether or not this constituted torture:

“All I can say is that it was used in the Spanish Inquisition, it was used in Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia, and there are reports that it is being used against Buddhist monks today,” Mr. McCain, who spent more than five years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, said in a telephone interview.

Of presidential candidates like Mr. Giuliani, who say that they are unsure whether waterboarding is torture, Mr. McCain said: “They should know what it is. It is not a complicated procedure. It is torture.”

However, the few willing to publicly decry this practice remain the exception that proves the rule.

Most Republicans seem to have fallen behind the party line that the US must be willing to engage in any action in order to fight terrorists, apparently believing that when one's civilisation is under threat that one must immediately abandon the beliefs that previously defined that civilisation.

Indeed, Republican supporters like Bill O'Reilly have gone much further than expressing confusion over whether or not waterboarding is torture and have started arguing that it should be used because it works.

O'Reilly then characterized waterboarding as " putting a little water on their face". He challenged Bogart with, " You'd rather have people die than give the President the latitude.."

So you see, for some Republicans like O'Reilly, those who oppose waterboarding are actually aiding in the deaths of innocents.

When they are swept from power at the next election they will be puzzled as to why they are viewed with such revulsion. They really don't get it.

So Ridge's condemnation is to welcomed, especially as it seems to highlight the silence from so many others who ought to know better.

“Qui tacet consentire vidétur.” Silence equals consent.

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