Ronald Reagan opposed torture. In 1984, he signed an international treaty banning torture that gave any signatory country the right to invade any other signatory country suspected of torturing its citizens and make arrests, if the government itself refused or was unable to stop them.
In 2008, the candidates for both major parties, Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain, who was tortured by North Vietnamese when he was a prisoner of war, agreed that waterboarding was torture. This position put them in direct opposition to the sitting president, George W. Bush, and his top aides, including Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and Vice Pres. Dick Cheney, who produced a torture procedures manual in the White House in which waterboarding was an approved technique, which they rebranded in Newspeak as an “enhanced interrogation technique.” Pres. Obama banned waterboarding as one of his first offical acts.
Still, Republicans today are split on whether America should be a torture state. When the subject of torture came up during the CBS News/National Journal debate at Wofford College in South Carolina Saturday night, it produced mixed results among the candidates as well as in the audience:
Moderator Major Garrett began by asking (co?)frontrunner Herman Cain for his stance on torture. After a long pause, Cain responded, “I do not agree with torture — period. However, I will trust the judgment of our military leaders to determine what is torture, and what is not torture.”
Garrett followed up by asking Cain if he believed that waterboarding is torture, or simply an “enhanced interrogation technique.”
“I agree that it was an enhanced interrogation technique,” Cain replied, to a mixture of laughter and light applause. “I would return to that policy, I don’t see it as torture, I see it as an enhanced interrogation technique.”
Former frontrunner Rep. Michele Bachmann then weighed in, saying that as president, she would be willing to use waterboarding, to rousing applause, but also the odd jeer. She went on to claim that President Obama is “losing the War On Terror,” despite the President’s soaring terrorist body count.
Major Garrett, citing his “Spidey sense,” then tossed the question to Rep. Ron Paul, who received loud applause for saying that “waterboarding is torture,” and noting that “it’s illegal under international law, and our law. It’s also immoral.”
Even former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman got a loud cheer for saying that he opposes torture.
With his answer, Huntsman, the candidate with the best chance of beating Obama in 2012, demonstrated why he is considered too liberal by the GOP’s mouth-breathing, blood-thirsty base:
“We diminish our standing in the world and the values that we project which include liberty, democracy, human rights, and open markets when we torture,” Huntsman said.
“We should not torture. Waterboarding is torture. We dilute ourselves down like a whole lot of other countries. And we lose that ability to project values that a lot of people in corners of this world are still relying on the United States to stand up for them.”
Former frontrunner Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, stated his position with his signature mangled syntax, couching in the highest possible stakes:
“For us not to have the ability to extract information to save our young people’s lives is a travesty. This is war. And I am for [using any tactics] … and I will be for it until I die.
Asked about the Republicans’ debate over torture, Pres. Obama, speaking to reporters in Hawaii where the United States was hosting a meeting of APEC, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, said:
They’re wrong. Waterboarding is torture. It’s contrary to America’s traditions. It’s contrary to our ideals. That’s not who we are. That’s not how we operate. We don’t need it in order to prosecute the war on terrorism. And we did the right thing by ending that practice.
If we want to lead around the world, part of our leadership is setting a good example. And anybody who has actually read about and understands the practice of waterboarding would say that that is torture. And that’s not something we do — period.
A New York Times/CBS News poll taken in the spring of 2009 found that 71 percent of Americans believed that waterboarding was torture.
