Eberle on waterboarding and torture

I could be wrong, of course -- and Chris Eberle can certainly speak for himself -- but . . .   With respect to Rob's recent post, "Waterboarding is (still) torture":  I did not take Chris Eberle to be suggesting otherwise.

As I see it, Rob's initial post quoted the Armed Forces Journal editors' statement that "[w]aterboarding inflicts on its victims the terror of imminent death. And as with all torture techniques, it is, therefore, an inherently flawed method for gaining reliable information. In short, it doesn’t work. That blunt truth means all U.S. leaders, present and future, should be clear on the issue[.]"

In response, Chris said two things:  First, he denied the suggestion that practices which "inflict[] on [their] victims the terror of imminent death" are "inherently flawed method[s] for gaining reliable information."  He wrote:

Surely, threatening some people with the terror of imminent death works sometimes and doesn’t work other times.

Second, Chris added:

The serious moral question, I think, is whether we should torture even if doing so is an effective means of protecting innocents.

Chris's statement strikes me as both correct and important.  That is, it seems correct to say that "terror of imminent death works sometimes and doesn't work other times."  And, it is important to be clear that the morality of a particular practice does not, and should not, depend on whether that practice "works."  So, Chris is insisting -- as we at MOJ do but the editors of the Armed Services Journal might not do -- that the argument against torture is not a merely consequentialist one.

Rob also writes:

Waterboarding, in my (admittedly limited) understanding, inflicts extreme physical suffering to the point that the subject expects death to result.  It is not simply providing information to the subject that they will be killed unless they cooperate.  Waterboarding violates the person's physical integrity, inflicts extreme physical suffering, and as a product of that physical suffering, creates the perception of imminent death.  I'm open to arguments as to why that's not torture.

I didn't take Chris to be suggesting that a practice which "violates the person's physical integrity, inflicts extreme physical suffering, and as a product of that physical suffering, creates the perception of imminent death" is not torture.  His point, it seems to me, was that, if such a practice is immoral, it is not because it does not work, but because of some other, non-consequentalist consideration (one that, I'm confident, Rob would endorse).

But again, maybe I'm mis-understanding Chris's point.