What's not interesting is that Tom Maguire is a dickhead.
Paul Begala makes a claim not supported by any of the evidence on offer, but relies on wordplay to claim victory in a dispute with Mark Hemingway of the NRO. [A noted wordsmith can't spot the fallacy or do the research. Surprise!]
Begala's claim is that "the United States executed Japanese war criminals for waterboarding". His source is this Politifact article backing a similar claim by John McCain. Politifact opens with this quote from McCain, who was expressing his opposition to waterboarding:
"I forgot to mention last night that following World War II war crime trials were convened. The Japanese were tried and convicted and hung for war crimes committed against American POWs. Among those charges for which they were convicted was waterboarding," he told reporters at a campaign event.
The slippage is obvious - if war criminals who committed many bad acts including waterboarding were executed, McCain's statement would be accurate but Begala's would not be.
Um, no, that's crap. Let's walk through this slowly for the moron-American community, namely, anyone who takes Tom Maguire seriously.
What Maguire wants us to believe is that unless someone can find an instance of someone being charged primarily with water-torture and then being executed, you can't say we ever executed anyone "for" waterboarding:
Who did we execute whose primary offense was waterboarding in WWII?
Should be "whom." Meh. Hitler!
More to the point, this is ridiculous. The idea that "we" did not convict and sentence someone "for" waterboarding because the people who were by and large also convicted for other things too does not mean that we did not convict them "for" waterboarding. Actually it means we did.
The key point is that, as Maguire's own link makes clear, waterboarding was considered torture, and was thus a crime against humanity, and thus punishable by death:
In brief, Class A were those accused of "crimes against peace"—first of all, planning, preparing, initiating, or waging a declared or undeclared war of aggression, or a war in violation of international law and treaties; or, participating in a conspiracy for the accomplishment for any of the foregoing. Class B were those people charged with conventional war crimes—namely violations of the laws and customs of war, including the maltreatment of civilians and prisoners of war. Class C were all those accused of crimes against humanity—those who had carried out torture, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts before or during the war, or persecution on political, religious, or racial grounds ordered by superiors.
Torture alone could get you charged with a crime against humanity; waterboarding was torture. Waterboarding fell into a specific class of crimes, each of which was by the standards of this legal regime a capital offense. What Maguire wants you to think is that if someone were convicted of two counts of murder, one for stabbing, one for shooting, we couldn't say this guy was "convicted for stabbing." For fuck's sake.
It would actually be pretty damn surprising, I'd think, if in this historical place and time someone were to be only accused of waterboarding. Like that would be the only category of torture these guys liked to play with? They were specialists? Pfffft.
Note BTW that I do not have to produce any evidence to show anything beyond what Maguire accepts McCain saying arguendo: that's enough to prove him an asshole, his own terms. Though he also manages to discover an example that actually, omigod, works against his silly "case":
Seitara Hata was just one Japanese soldier charged with a war crime for waterboarding; Hatara was sentenced to 25 years hard labor.
This suggests that because waterboarding was the ONLY form of torture they had against this guy, they showed leniency -- death could have been the sentence, but he "only" got 25 years hard labor. This is hardly proof that you could not get death for waterboarding. Not all convicted murderers get the death penalty, you know, even in Texas. Rather what this suggests is that one step down from the ultimate price for torture in this legal regime was... 25 hard.
I still do hear now and again that Tom Maguire is a "reasonable" conservative. He's a fucking smarmy asshole.