An Expert on Torture

A brief news note: On Saturday morning — despite a number of technical difficulties which included the New York hotel where he was staying replacing his room phone to reduce line noise — I talked with Dr. Manfred Nowak, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, who was up to New York delivering a report to the General Assembly. That conversation is scheduled to be the EP podcast of November 16. It's wide-ranging and runs slightly over an hour and I won't try to summarize it here. But towards the beginning I did want to get Dr. Nowak on the record on one thing: Is waterboarding torture? The question may not have as obvious an answer as one might think, because much of the technical literature on torture shies away from the sort of detailed rules one finds, for example, in criminal law. Dr. Nowak, however, stepped up to the plate and declared, quite unequivocally, that, yes, waterboarding is torture. Considering he's a very cautious, careful lawyer, and former judge, who's perhaps the world's preeminent expert on torture, this is quite a significant statement. I just thought you'd like to know.