Hitchens discovers torture
Vanity Fair writer Christopher Hitchens, more or less on a dare from Editor Graydon Carter, agreed to be waterboarded. You can watch the video here and read Hitchens’ account here.
Hitchens’ second go, which is what I think the video is of, lasts, perhaps 15 seconds and half a cup of water. No question, the Hitchens gag reflex and fear of drowning leave him wide open to the fear which waterboarding creates.
And, equally no question, this is a horribly effective means of scaring the living daylights out of someone.
Which is, of course, the point.
Hitchens’ conclusion is that this is torture and that “I still wish that my experience were the only way in which the words “waterboard” and “American” could be mentioned in the same (gasping and sobbing) breath.” And, of course, he’s right. We all wish that waterboarding, leave aside the nastier, leaves marks - visible and invisible - end of of torture, need never be associated with our names. But have we that luxury?
At the moment I think we do which is why Graydon Carter was happy to dare Hitch to go mano mano with a damp towel. It is a luxury hard won by 4000 dead in Iraq, dead Canadians in Afghanistan, a series of successes against a strategically inept al Qaeda, the beclowing of radical Islam and, frankly, a great deal of very good luck.
Will that luck hold; Lord I hope so.
But here, via Andrew Sullivan, is the case for the other side:
But at yesterday’s Aspen panel on nuclear non-proliferation, the general consensus was that there’s a reasonably high likelihood that a nuclear device will be detonated in an American city, New York or Washington most likely, at some point in the next ten years. And the experts on the panel, John Holdren and Joe Cirincione among them, are not exactly attached to the Bush Administration worldview. After such an attack, we’ll look back — those of us still around, obviously — on our efforts to combat al Qaeda and judge them inadequate to the task, just as we look back now on the Clinton Administration’s pre-9/11 preparations (and the Bush Administration’s, as well) as thoroughly inadequate. So I suppose I’m convinced of two things simultaneously: Al Qaeda is fairly weak, and not very popular at all, and that this might not matter as much as people think. jeffrey goldberg, the atlantic
Written by jay on July 2nd, 2008 with
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