Do 2016 Republicans want to bring torture back?

Now that you've grown addicted to the sweet, sweet taste of democracy in action, i.e. presidential primary debates, you can start looking forward to the next Republican gathering on October 28th. And I have a suggestion for a topic the candidates should address: torture.

Isn't that old news, a Bush-era issue we've moved past? Actually no.

Just this week the ACLU filed suit against the two psychologists who designed the Bush administration's torture program, and more to the point, the next president will have a decision to make. Most Republicans will tell you that the torture program was both effective and humane, a morally defensible and essential tool in fighting terrorism. Terrorism, you may have noticed, still exists. So if you're a presidential candidate who thinks that torture was useful in stopping terrorism, why wouldn't you want to start doing it again? Indeed, wouldn't you be negligent in your obligation to protect America if you didn't order prisoners to be tortured?

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Before we go further, you may be wondering about my use of the word "torture" to describe the things we did to terrorism suspects. The reason is that those techniques fall squarely within the definition of torture embodied in both U.S. law and the U.N. Convention Against Torture, which is essentially that torture is the intentional infliction of severe physical or mental harm for the purpose of obtaining information or a confession. When the Bush administration decided it wanted to use torture, it came up with some legally laughable and morally abominable analyses claiming essentially that torture isn't torture if we just say so. But I've been asking for years whether anyone could give me a definition of torture that would exclude things like waterboarding or stress positions (which are designed to produce excruciating pain). No one has provided an answer.

After he took office, Barack Obama issued an executive order banning the use of the Bush administration's torture techniques, but a future president would be able to renew them with an executive order of his or her own. We've debated this issue periodically, like when the Senate Intelligence Committee released a non-classified version of its report on the program late last year, detailing the use of not just waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and stress positions, but also things like beatings and mock executions. Whenever it comes up, Republicans will troop to TV studios to defend the program and insist the Bush administration did nothing wrong.

Now fast-forward to the current campaign. One thing all the Republican presidential candidates agree on is that the world is terribly dangerous, and Barack Obama is a weakling who makes us more vulnerable to terrifying outside threats with his unwillingness to do what needs to be done to the barbarians who threaten us. So how many of them are going to advocate a renewal of the torture program?

Some of them have taken positions on this question before. In June, the Senate passed a bill limiting CIA interrogations to the techniques used in the Army Field Manual; Rand Paul and Ted Cruz voted for it, while Lindsey Graham voted against it. Marco Rubio missed the vote, but said he would have voted against it.

That doesn't mean they necessarily want to bring back torture, just that they don't want to rule it out either. In the same vein, Jeb Bush has said he might use waterboarding some day, but insisted that it isn't torture. Why? Because America, that's why. "There's a difference between enhanced interrogation techniques and torture," he said. "America doesn't torture."

You'll be shocked to hear that Donald Trump is a torture enthusiast, while Ben Carson is too, because, "We've gotten into this mindset of fighting politically correct wars." (Carson was asked a question about it in the first debate; it didn't come up again). Carly Fiorina is also a fan of waterboarding.

So among the leading presidential candidates, the ones taking the leftmost position on this issue are Rand Paul, which you'd probably expect, and Ted Cruz, which you probably wouldn't. (Cruz has evinced less enthusiasm for foreign adventures than many of the other candidates; he says that it's one thing to have ourselves a good invasion or two, but, "It is not the job of the U.S. military to engage in nation building to turn foreign countries into democratic utopias.")

None of them, however, have come out and said, yes, I'd start torturing again. But they ought to make it clear whether they would or wouldn't. And if they say no, then we ought to know why. Is it because torture really didn't work, and it was wrong no matter who it was used on? Or is it because terrorism isn't really the threat they've been telling us it is?

Either way, we ought to know what they think.