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Christopher Hitchens Gets Waterboarded Tortured

By Justin Gardner | Related entries in The War On Terrorism, The World, Torture, United States, al Qaeda

I’m sure you’ve heard the reports of what this process actually feels like (a slow drowning), so I’ll spare you Hitchens’ explanation.

Instead, let’s look at the aftermath…

The interrogators would hardly have had time to ask me any questions, and I knew that I would quite readily have agreed to supply any answer. I still feel ashamed when I think about it.

Also, in case it’s of interest, I have since woken up trying to push the bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and claustrophobia. No doubt this will pass.

As if detecting my misery and shame, one of my interrogators comfortingly said, “Any time is a long time when you’re breathing water.” I could have hugged him for saying so, and just then I was hit with a ghastly sense of the sadomasochistic dimension that underlies the relationship between the torturer and the tortured.

I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

He then cites two of the biggest reasons why any sort of torture is just a bad policy…

3. It may be a means of extracting information, but it is also a means of extracting junk information. [...] To put it briefly, even the C.I.A. sources for the Washington Post story on waterboarding conceded that the information they got out of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was “not all of it reliable.” Just put a pencil line under that last phrase, or commit it to memory.

4. It opens a door that cannot be closed. Once you have posed the notorious “ticking bomb” question, and once you assume that you are in the right, what will you not do? Waterboarding not getting results fast enough? The terrorist’s clock still ticking? Well, then, bring on the thumbscrews and the pincers and the electrodes and the rack.

Good to see Hitchens “gets it.”

Too bad many Republicans, including McCain, still don’t.


This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 and is filed under The War On Terrorism, The World, Torture, United States, al Qaeda. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Christopher Hitchens Gets Waterboarded Tortured”

  1. Jimmy the Dhimmi Says:
    July 2nd, 2008 at 12:49 pm

    Too bad many Republicans, including McCain, still don’t.

    Why does McCain not get it? This was one of the issues that a lot of the “not getting it” republicans challenged him on during the primary. I have always heard McCain say waterboarding is torture and that it should be prohibited. Where is your evidence on the contrary?

    Hitch also says this about the SEER members who carried out the technique:

    Faced with appalling enemies who make horror videos of torture and beheadings, they feel that they are the ones who confront denunciation in our press, and possible prosecution. As they have just tried to demonstrate to me, a man who has been waterboarded may well emerge from the experience a bit shaky, but he is in a mood to surrender the relevant information and is unmarked and undamaged and indeed ready for another bout in quite a short time. When contrasted to actual torture, waterboarding is more like foreplay. No thumbscrew, no pincers, no electrodes, no rack. Can one say this of those who have been captured by the tormentors and murderers of (say) Daniel Pearl? On this analysis, any call to indict the United States for torture is therefore a lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilization and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out, and ultimately to bring it down. I myself do not trust anybody who does not clearly understand this viewpoint.

    So he seems to at least have some sympathy to the other side of the argument as well, and acknowledges that it is a more nuanced issue than many people make it out to be.

  2. David Gillette Says:
    August 8th, 2008 at 8:40 am

    WAAAAAA is it or not? You bubble heads do not get it!!! These aholes want to kill Americans and will stop at nothing. Pull your heads out.

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