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DOJ to investigate waterboarding.

February 23, 2008, 11:40 am
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Speaking of Augustine…the Department of Justice has announced an investigation into waterboarding–sort of. Not a criminal investigation, of course–Attorney General Mukasey has already promised not to look into that (thank you, Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein). Rather, DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility will investigate “the department’s legal approval for waterboarding of Qaeda suspects by the CIA,” according to the New York Times.

The disclosure by H. Marshall Jarrett, the head of the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, was the first official acknowledgment of an internal review of the legal memorandums the department has issued since 2002 that authorized waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods.

Mr. Jarrett’s report could become the first public accounting for legal advice that endorsed methods widely denounced as torture by human rights groups and legal authorities. His office can refer matters for criminal prosecution; legal experts said the most likely outcome was a public critique of the legal opinions on interrogation, noting that Mr. Jarrett had the power to reprimand or to seek the disbarment of current or former Justice Department lawyers.

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Comments

  1. Margaret O’Brien Steinfels 02/23/2008 - 1:16 pm  subscriber  contributor

    So Grant, even in Augustine’s time, there was waterboarding? What do they call it in Latin?

  2. David Nickol 02/23/2008 - 5:02 pm  subscriber

    Apparently waterboarding doesn’t go back to the time of Augustine, but originated in the Spanish Inquisition. Augustine, however, would have approved, although apparently not been very happy in doing so.

    Less often observed is that the practice of waterboarding has roots in the Spanish Inquisition and parallels the persecution of Anabaptists during the Protestant Reformation and the Roman Catholic Counter Reformation. Why did practices similar to waterboarding develop as a way to torture heretics—whether the heretics were Anabaptists or, in the Inquisition, Protestants of any stripe as well as Jews and witches and others?

    Roman Catholics and Protestants alike persecuted the Anabaptists or “re-baptizers” since these people denied infant baptism in favor of adult baptism. The use of torture and physical abuse was meant to stem the movement and also to bring salvation to heretics. It had been held—at least since St. Augustine—that punishment, even lethal in form, could be an act of mercy meant to keep a sinner from continuing in sin, either by repentance of heresy or by death. King Ferdinand declared that drowning—called the third baptism—was a suitable response to Anabaptists. Water as a form of torture was an inversion of the waters of baptism under the (grotesque) belief that it could deliver the heretic from his or her sins.

    http://marty-center.uchicago.edu/sightings/archive_2007/1129.shtml

  3. Jim Pauwels 02/25/2008 - 5:04 pm  subscriber

    Is there a word for the felicitous typo? Dep*tart*ment of Justice just seems so fitting these last few years …

  4. Grant Gallicho 02/25/2008 - 5:08 pm  contributor

    Good grief! Thanks, Jim. Fixed.

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