Cliff May makes an incoherent argument over at National Review, writing that I’ve potentially incited “some crazy” to attack May or his family by criticizing his pro-torture positions. May writes that “I had explicitly written that I oppose torture,” and he had—before arguing that “we now know that Islamists believe their religion forbids them to cooperate with infidels — until they have reached the limit of their ability to endure the hardships the infidel is inflicting on them.” So we need to push a Muslim terrorism suspect to the limits of their ability to withstand pain in order to make sure they’ve met their religious obligations—but that isn’t torture. And it isn’t singling out the detainees' religion in order to justify it. May writes that there “may be methods of interrogation that are unpleasant but fall short of torture,” but of course those methods, such as waterboarding, have been seen as torture for hundreds of years, and prosecuted as crimes in the United States.
May was talking in particular about Abu Zubayda, the al-Qaeda fixer the Bush administration was convinced was a high-level operative, who gave up all the useful information he had before he was tortured. Of course, if you were convinced that Muslims only give up information under torture, and that Zubayda was withholding information on that basis, then you’d have to torture him. This is what May calls “opposing torture.” The implications of this line of thought are chilling: if you believe someone who is innocent to be an Islamic extremist, you couldn’t actually know for sure unless you tortured them.
Good luck to May in arguing that waterboarding isn't torture and torturing detainees to the point where they've met their “religious obligations” has nothing to do with a skewed perspective on Islam and its adherents. Meanwhile, I can't help but be startled by this contradiction: May doesn't think being waterboarded 83 times is torture, but written criticism makes him fear for his life. If only May could feel as much empathy for someone stuffed in a tiny box or slammed into a wall as he does for himself when people don’t like what he has to say.
— A. Serwer
