Last Thursday, Jim Olson, former CIA chief of counterintelligence, came to campus to discuss different aspects of the espionage business. During the question-and-answer session the issue of waterboarding – where they lay interogees down and pour water over their breathing passges to simulate drowning – arose; Olson’s answer was the current rhetoric coming from The Powers That Be. It’s wrong, we know that. But. it did work .

The surreal trip that has been the waterboarding controversy continues to develop new twists and turns as our national image of patriotic Uncle Sam is looking more and more like a thug named Knuckles. The last several days have only further underlined the continuing decay in our government.

First, we had an admission of sorts by the White House; an admission that said yes, we waterboarded, but it was only three times and we’d do it again to save America, because God bless it, we love it so gosh darn much! Although not exactly verbatim, the patriotic shtick is being slathered on pretty thick, as this government has been won’t to do.

We also have a frank CIA Director Joseph Hayden publicly saying both the CIA lawyers and the Justice Department consider waterboarding “unlawful under current statue.”

Even Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell acknowledged the severity of the torture, which can result in death, but he also chimed in, “There are situations where it might be employed.”

Olson, in his lecture on campus, took this a step further: It would be nice if this issue were black and white, but pretend that you’re Jack Bauer for a second (or Chuck Norris, it doesn’t matter) and imagine, if you had to torture one man, but could potentially save thousands, would you do it?

This is a theme that has cropped up in all the recent admissions of waterboarding – essentially saying, “We did it, we’re sorry, we don’t do it now, so PLEASE don’t make it illegal, otherwise we’ll have to break the law to do it again.”

That’s all this administration needs to do – publicly decry waterboarding while surreptitiously planting the idea that some options are just too potentially valuable to ever rule out completely. Of course, the biggest problem with this line of thought is that the public will probably never learn what that information consisted of, nor if it could have been obtained in any other way.

I don’t understand why this is still an issue.

Although the U.N. convention on torture does not explicitly list waterboarding as torture, it does outlaw “cruel, inhumane and degrading” treatment. To then claim that waterboarding is exempt from, or doesn’t meet, the criteria of being cruel and inhumane is simply ignorant.

Furthermore, the United Nations’ torture investigator, Manfred Nowak, has criticized the Bush administration for defending its use of waterboarding and has urged the U.S. to abandon the “unjustifiable interrogation methods.” Amnesty International has also decried the act as torture and is calling for a prompt, full and independent criminal investigation. The short and uncomfortable truth is that waterboarding is seen as torture by the international community at large, and we have admitted to engaging in torture.

We cannot continue to talk of grandiose ideals of freedom and liberty while standing so deep in the filth of our hypocrisy. We are breaking international law. We need decisive action. We are members of Iowa’s 4th congressional district and our congressman is Tom Latham. His e-mail is [email protected] and his DC office toll-free phone number is 866-428-5642. Our congressional representatives need to know how we feel on this issue. As a nation, we need to stand and voice our opinion on waterboarding.

– Quincy Miller is a senior in English from Altoona.