On December 23rd, former Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Mark Bowden published a column in the paper titled “In Defense of Waterboarding”, which outlined his justifications for the U.S.’s use of the controversial torture tactic on “terrorist” Abu Zubaydah. Three days later, the piece remains one of the most viewed and most e-mailed on philly.com. In this guest post, Philadelphia magazine writer-at-large Jason Fagone calls B.S. on the whole deal.

Ever wonder why Inquirer honcho Brian Tierney had to lay off about 70 of his local news gatherers and copy editors despite claiming that he wanted to make the Inky the best pound-for-pound local newspaper in the country — the “Mossad” of American journalism? Well, apparently it was so he could hire people like Mark Bowden to write op-ed columns that read, for all of Bowden’s experience as a reporter in the Middle East, like they were issued from the desk of Dick Cheney’s lawyers, or Rudy Giuliani’s campaign.

This one, on waterboarding, is such a doozy, it’s hard to know where to start — perhaps with Bowden’s insistence that psychological torture is more humane than torture that causes pain?

Waterboarding is a process by which a detainee is strapped down and forced to ingest and inhale water until he experiences the terror of drowning. It is not torture in the traditional sense of inflicting pain; it inflicts fear, intense, visceral fear, without doing physical harm. It is a method calculated to straddle the definitions of coercion and torture, and as such merely proves that both methods inhabit the same slippery continuum. There is a difference between gouging out a man’s eyes and keeping him awake, and waterboarding falls somewhere in between.

Is it just me, or is this argument — that torture that causes unendurable, primal fear is more humane than torture that causes pain — a little bit insane? I mean, doesn’t Big Brother’s continuum of torture in 1984 begin with the physical torture, electroshocks and the like, and ramp up to the cruel mind games? The thing with the rat cage, and so on? Anyway, here are some folks who ought to know, and they disagree pretty vehemently with Bowden’s continuum.

But that’s just for starters. What about Bowden’s implication that it’s okey-dokey, nay, morally courageous, to threaten a prisoner with the “fear of bad things happening to those close to you”? What about his characterization of Abu Zubaydah as some kind of ten-point terrorist buck when in fact, as Ron Suskind reported in The One Percent Doctrine, the government knew that Zubaydah was a bunny rabbit, a low-level factotum — and mentally insane to boot — before the CIA ever tortured him? What about Bowden’s weirdly casual and Rumsfeldian assertion that the Abu Ghraib scandal was partly the media’s fault — a result of photographs “untethered from context”? What about the super-suave way he dismisses, up front, the whole issue of the CIA’s illegal destruction of the Zubaydah torture tapes by using a single little bullshit word: “wisdom”?

I respect Mark Bowden as a reporter. But I think this column is actually worse than anything written by, say, John Yoo, a noted torture advocate. That guy is a dick. We know he’s a dick. So we don’t listen to him. But a lot of people listen to Mark Bowden. What’s Bowden’s excuse?

(Also: I love that this column dropped two days before Christmas. The year that began with an epic layoff ended with a glib defense of torture and criminality. Happy holidays, Inky readers! 2008 should be barrels o’ fun.) — Jason Fagone

PHOTO: ABC News

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 26th, 2007 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Media, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted by A.J. Daulerio on 12/26/07 in Media, Politics