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You are here: Home / Politics / War on Terror / War on Terror aka GSAVE® / Update From the “No Shit” Department

Update From the “No Shit” Department

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Via Memeorandum, this Hitchens piece about his experience being waterboarded. His conclusion? It is torture:

You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The “board” is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and—as you might expect—inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.

***

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.

***

Which returns us to my starting point, about the distinction between training for something and training to resist it. One used to be told—and surely with truth—that the lethal fanatics of al-Qaeda were schooled to lie, and instructed to claim that they had been tortured and maltreated whether they had been tortured and maltreated or not. Did we notice what a frontier we had crossed when we admitted and even proclaimed that their stories might in fact be true? I had only a very slight encounter on that frontier, but 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.

You can watch the video here. I am just disgusted that our national debate has been so debased by bed-wetters terrified about terrorism and the sadist tough guys who consider themselves our daddies and protectors that we even have to keep arguing over whether an obvious form of torture is, in fact, torture. It is, and I am glad Hitchens will loudly say as much.

Reader Interactions

55Comments

  3. 3.

    Josh

    Abraham Lincoln also said: “Whenever I hear anyone arguing for torture, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”

    Actually, he said “slavery”, not “torture”. Six of one, half a dozen of the other…

  6. 6.

    smiley

    Unfortunately, there are far too many Americans who still believe what the government tells them — even after 7 years of the Bush regime. To them, if told that America doesn’t torture, then even waterboarding isn’t torture.

  7. 7.

    Incertus

    You know, if you cultivate this trait called empathy, you don’t actually have to experience something shitty to recognize that it is, in fact, shitty. But Hitchens wouldn’t know about that.

  8. 8.

    cleek

    makes me want to strike my chest three times and shout “God Bless America!” so that all the office can hear.

    DIAF, BushCo

  9. 9.

    Scott H

    This is just a bunch of fairly vain column inches by a wheezy old inebriate wringing the next few bottles out of what the rest of us knew when all of this began. It means nothing until the people responsible are brought to account – which isn’t going to happen.

  10. 10.

    Wilfred

    To them, if told that America doesn’t torture, then even waterboarding isn’t torture.

    We’ve already been through that. The questions raised at Mukasey’s confirmation hearing had strictly to do with the legality/illegality of waterboarding. It was perfect circular reasoning: if it was legal, it wasn’t torture. Since it was done, it was legal, and hence not torture. FREEDOM!

  11. 11.

    libarbarian

    I loved this

    Torture advocates hide behind the argument that an open discussion about specific American interrogation techniques will aid the enemy. Yet, convicted Al Qaeda members and innocent captives who were released to their host nations have already debriefed the world through hundreds of interviews, movies and documentaries on exactly what methods they were subjected to and how they endured. Our own missteps have created a cadre of highly experienced lecturers for Al Qaeda’s own virtual sere school for terrorists.

  12. 12.

    Lee

    It seems everyone has their one issue with BushCo. For John it was Schiavo (sp?)

    This is mine.

    I might not vote for any Republican again because of this.

    It is digusting what these cowards have done to our country.

  13. 13.

    El Cid

    Incertus Says:

    You know, if you cultivate this trait called empathy, you don’t actually have to experience something shitty to recognize that it is, in fact, shitty. But Hitchens wouldn’t know about that.

    True, but then there’d be a whole range of policies & attitudes which would be harder to back. That’s why to someone like Hitchens, Orwell’s basic human decency was a problem, and what Hitchens saw in Orwell was the Contrarian Game. Since Hitchens likes to play Orwell Jr., why don’t we recall this:

    Revenge is Sour

    by George Orwell

    Published 9 November 1945, The Tribune.

    WHENEVER I read phrases like ‘war guilt trials’, ‘punishment of war criminals’ and so forth, there comes back into my mind the memory of something I saw in a prisoner-of-war camp in South Germany, earlier this year.

    Another correspondent and myself were being shown round the camp by a little Viennese Jew who had been enlisted in the branch of the American army which deals with the interrogation of prisoners. He was an alert, fair-haired, rather good-looking youth of about twenty-five, and politically so much more knowledgeable than the average American officer that it was a pleasure to be with him. The camp was on an airfield, and, after we had been round the cages, our guide led us to a hangar where various prisoners who were in a different category from the others were being ‘screened’.

    Up at one end of the hangar about a dozen men were lying in a row on the concrete floor. These, it was explained, were S.S. officers who had been segregated from the other prisoners. Among them was a man in dingy civilian clothes who was lying with his arm across his face and apparently asleep. He had strange and horribly deformed feet. The two of them were quite symmetrical, but they were clubbed out into an extraordinary globular shape which made them more like a horse’s hoof than anything human. As we approached the group, the little Jew seemed to be working himself up into a state of excitement.

    ‘That’s the real swine!’ he said, and suddenly he lashed out with his heavy army boot and caught the prostrate man a fearful kick right on the bulge of one of his deformed feet.

    ‘Get up, you swine!’ he shouted as the man started out of sleep, and then repeated something of the kind in German. The prisoner scrambled to his feet and stood clumsily to attention. With the same air of working himself up into a fury—indeed he was almost dancing up and down as he spoke — the Jew told us the prisoner’s history. He was a ‘real’ Nazi: his party number indicated that he had been a member since the very early days, and he had held a post corresponding to a General in the political branch of the S.S. It could be taken as quite certain that he had had charge of concentration camps and had presided over tortures and hangings. In short, he represented everything that we had been fighting against during the past five years…

    …It is absurd to blame any German or Austrian Jew for getting his own back on the Nazis. Heaven knows what scores this particular man may have had to wipe out; very likely his whole family had been murdered; and after all, even a wanton kick to a prisoner is a very tiny thing compared with the outrages committed by the Hitler régime. But what this scene, and much else that I saw in Germany, brought home to me was that the whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish daydream.

    Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.

    Who would not have jumped for joy, in 1940, at the thought of seeing S.S. officers kicked and humiliated? But when the thing becomes possible, it is merely pathetic and disgusting…

    …Unfortunately, there is often a need of some concrete incident before one can discover the real state of one’s feelings.

    Here is another memory from Germany. A few hours after Stuttgart was captured by the French army, a Belgian journalist and myself entered the town, which was still in some disorder.

    The Belgian had been broadcasting throughout the war for the European Service of the BBC, and, like nearly all Frenchmen or Belgians, he had a very much tougher attitude towards ‘the Boche’ than an Englishman or an American would have.

    All the main bridges into town had been blown up, and we had to enter by a small footbridge which the Germans had evidently made efforts to defend. A dead German soldier was lying supine at the foot of the steps. His face was a waxy yellow. On his breast someone had laid a bunch of the lilac which was blooming everywhere.

    The Belgian averted his face as we went past. When we were well over the bridge he confided to me that this was the first time he had seen a dead man. I suppose he was thirty five years old, and for four years he had been doing war propaganda over the radio. For several days after this, his attitude was quite different from what it had been earlier. He looked with disgust at the bomb-wrecked town and the humiliation the Germans were undergoing, and even on one occasion intervened to prevent a particularly bad bit of looting.

    When he left, he gave the residue of the coffee we had brought with us to the Germans on whom we were billeted.

    A week earlier he would probably have been scandalized at the idea of giving coffee to a ‘Boche’. But his feelings, he told me, had undergone a change at the sight of ce pauvre mort beside the bridge: it had suddenly brought home to him the meaning of war. And yet, if we had happened to enter the town by another route, he might have been spared the experience of seeing one corpse out of the — perhaps — twenty million that the war has produced.

    Looks like, this time, Hitchens managed to cross the necessary bridge for him to see what lies behind his grand and cheap assertions.

  15. 15.

    The Moar You Know

    Unfortunately, there are far too many Americans who still believe what the government tells them—even after 7 years of the Bush regime. To them, if told that America doesn’t torture, then even waterboarding isn’t torture.

    I don’t think that there’s an American alive who wouldn’t acknowledge that waterboarding isn’t torture; I just think a dismayingly high percentage of the population doesn’t have a problem torturing anyone who “might be a terrorist”.

    The right has made this a game about whether waterboarding is torture, and as usual, the left took the bait.

  16. 16.

    rachel

    AkaDad Says:

    What makes John McCain a maverick, is that he openly supports torture.

    He does not openly support torture–he supports it sneakily.

  17. 17.

    AkaDad

    Instead of torture, I think we’d get more reliable information if we used hookers.

  18. 18.

    lilly Von Schtupp

    Have we ever had a serious and grown-up discussion about terrorism? 9/11 was catastrophic, tragic and scary, but it did not destroy the whole country. The British were hit, so were the people of Madrid and Bali. In each instance, if I remember correctly, they cleaned up, caught and prosecuted the perpetrators, mourned their dead, and perhaps the hardest thing of all, got on with their lives.

    What have we done? Invaded a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, detained and tortured people indefinetly, and shredded the constitution in the process.

    When we get hit again, and we will, I wonder what will happen. Whether it be some crazy anti-abortion person blowing up a clinic or some arab sounding/looking person with a gun at a mall, or the millions possibilities a lunatic could dream up, how will we react this time?

    Between the fear and ignorance that’s been peddled by this maladministration, I’m not optimistic.

    As for Hitchens, he’s not as smart or brave as he thinks he is if he actually has to be waterboarded to figure out it’s torture. What a twit.

  19. 19.

    DBrown

    The fact that repubics, bloody hands ‘animal’ cheney and dumb fuck, ass suck bush all enjoy people being tortured, and far too many real Americans (ie not repubics) tolerate this outrage against American values says all that is needed about the US (or us, too.)

  21. 21.

    smiley

    …I just think a dismayingly high percentage of the population doesn’t have a problem torturing anyone who “might be a terrorist”.

    I agree with that but I’ve seen too many snide comments like, “Hell, I’d pour a little water on a guy’s face if it stopped the next terrorist attack.”

  22. 22.

    Tsulagi

    Hey, don’t you go dissing with the ticking time bomb warriors most favorite fetish. If they couldn’t get off thinking of someone outside their basement torturing someone in the name of their country, life just wouldn’t be worth living for them. Without that Viagra, they wouldn’t be able to get little tiny up.

  23. 23.

    rawshark

    Previously you would only see torture in movies when the bad guys were trying to get info and it never worked and was shown to be barbaric. 9/11 changed everything.

  24. 24.

    Karmakin

    Holy hell, I do believe I waterboarded myself at one time. Well, not precisely. But what he’s describing, I’ve felt it myself.

    Years ago, we had one of those above-ground swimming pools in the back yard. We were going to the drive-in, (I think to see the original TMNT movie if memory serves me correctly..don’t laugh, I was 9) and I was messing around the lip of the pool. Fully dressed, I fell in. The cover was still on the top of the pool. So I was wet, might as well have fun.

    I dove under the water, swam to the other side, fine and dandy. I decided to try going underneath the pool tarp and lift it up, and see what that was like. I popped my head up in the middle, and it was a near vacumn. When I exhaled and tried to inhale, the tarp stuck to my face, and I couldn’t breath. Well, I went nuts, went back under the water, and eventually got to the edge just before I ran out of breath.

    I imagine that feeling is much the same feeling as waterboarding. And I still have VERY strong memories of that. I imagine waterboarding would be worse.

    Damn straight it’s torture.

  25. 25.

    HyperIon

    My physician brother-in-law (R-Fl) told me recently that:

    1. torture is like when your neighbor plays his boom box too loud…regrettable but no big deal. (Yes, he’s a southern white man who probably fears living next to black people.)

    2. it can’t be torture if you are walking around fifteen minutes later as if nothing ever happened.

    This made me wonder if the effect of electrodes on genitals lasts longer than 15 minutes. Then I thought: Fuck trying to reason with this asshole. That he is intelligent is irrelevant. People so inclined will find a way to justify this behavior, any behavior, in fact. Humans….can’t live with each other, can’t live without each other.

  26. 26.

    Apsaras

    Ok, next let’s drop some cluster bombs in Hitchens’s neighborhood. We might get him to turn around on this Iraq War just yet!

  27. 27.

    cleek

    Previously you would only see torture in movies when the bad guys were trying to get info and it never worked and was shown to be barbaric.

    oh now. who among us didn’t cheer for the guy with the drill in Marathon Man ?

  28. 28.

    slippytoad

    lilly Von Schtupp Says:

    Have we ever had a serious and grown-up discussion about terrorism?

    Not having had serious grownups in office for as long as I can remember, no.

    Hitchens’ cries of alarm would have more force, for me, if he hadn’t arrogantly cheerlead the invasion of Iraq in the first place. However, that being said it is nice that more and more people are awakening to the reality that torture, is in fact inhuman. I think only our disconnection from what’s been going on has permitted this to endure. Maybe waterboarding demonstrations should be given on every street corner.

    And for Hyperion’s example: it’s quite easy to walk around without your fingers, even if you had them only 15 minutes ago. But getting them removed with wire cutters is still torture. Your brother-in-law is one of those shit-for-brains on whom education is wasted.

  29. 29.

    ThymeZone

    What makes John McCain a maverick, is that he openly supports torture.

    Funniest line I have seen around here in a long time.

  30. 30.

    nightjar

    And the standard wingnut analysis from the Stata-Sphere.

    When 3,000+ lives may be on the line, I would say putting a known terrorist through some waterboarding is an unfortunate but humane option. I would not want to go through it, but then again I don’t plan to kill thousands of people

    Ah, yes, The ticking time bomb scenario. Never has happened, but it could, and of course any terrorist who is waterboarded has been confirmed a terrorist by Lord Cheney the Malevolent Protector, so as to make it legal and all.

  33. 33.

    4tehlulz

    I would be very interested in seeing Hitchens demonstrate the seppuku ceremony. That would help rehabilitate him, IMO.

  34. 34.

    Calouste

    And the standard wingnut analysis from the Stata-Sphere.

    When 3,000+ lives may be on the line, I would say putting a known terrorist through some waterboarding is an unfortunate but humane option. I would not want to go through it, but then again I don’t plan to kill thousands of people

    Ah, yes, The ticking time bomb scenario. Never has happened, but it could, and of course any terrorist who is waterboarded has been confirmed a terrorist by Lord Cheney the Malevolent Protector, so as to make it legal and all.

    Oh yes. Torturing suicidebombers. So likely to be effective.

  36. 36.

    RSA

    Strata-Sphere prefaces those remarks with these:

    Waterboarding is not ‘torture’ in my mind. . . Yes, it is horribly unnerving, as Christopher Hitchen’s just learned. No one likes to be helpless and controlled by others. But it is a practice that we use in our military training on our own.

    Hitchens addressed exactly these points in his article. Hitchens didn’t call it unnerving–he called it torture. And he spends a couple of paragraphs discussing the difference between training for something and training to resist it. How can someone read something and ignore the basic points the author is making? Strata-Sphere might as well have written, “Let’s ignore Hitchens’s article–here’s what I think.”

  37. 37.

    Joshua

    It’s just weird how quickly they fall back on to the “ticking time bomb” scenario. Like EVERYONE the American government captures is not JUST a terrorist, but is a terrorist who knows all about whatever terrorism plans are next on the queue, undoubtedly ready to go within mere weeks (but more likely days or hours) at the most.

    It’s absurd. Of course, they could always retort to the one percent doctrine and claim that there is a chance this is the case. But I wouldn’t even think its 1%. Out of the thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of people America has captured and tortured, how many people fit this situation? I would be shocked if it were 2. I would be surprised if it were 1.

  38. 38.

    Zuzu's Petals

    Cue Patterico for another inane and pointless hypothetical.

    I can’t even bring myself to go look.

  39. 39.

    Dracula

    Previously you would only see torture in movies when the bad guys were trying to get info and it never worked and was shown to be barbaric.

    All of youse are pussies. F’in RAMBO resisted all of this torture, including electric shocks, and he still survived. In fact, he escaped and went on to make another Rocky movie.

    So suck on that, sallys.

  40. 40.

    John Cole

    Cue Patterico for another inane and pointless hypothetical.

    Actually, Patterico harshed on this administration about torture and their bullshit evidence pretty severely the other day. I know what many of you think of him, and I still think the kcik in the junk brouhaha was absolutely absurd, but he really does try to be fair. And he was about the only person out there who was defending Judge Kozinski, and I really appreciate his doing that.

    I kept meaning to link his Kozinski stuff that but this administration and this campaign so far are so maddening they suck all the life out of everything else and I forgot.

  41. 41.

    Chris

    El Cid Says:
    Yeah, but what if Hitchens had tried liquor-boarding?

    I should have known someone would beat me to the “if it were Maker’s Mark it wouldn’t have been torture” meme.

    And this…

    Apsaras Says:
    Ok, next let’s drop some cluster bombs in Hitchens’s neighborhood. We might get him to turn around on this Iraq War just yet!

    Dude, that’s my old neighborhood….not cool! Its a good hood.

    I used to see Hitch looking very very shaky in the morning, getting taxied off to some CSPAN call in he could have done without. Always resisted making the wisecrack cause i felt sorry for him.

  42. 42.

    RSA

    Of course, they could always retort to the one percent doctrine and claim that there is a chance this is the case.

    Isn’t it funny that the 1% doctrine applies to torturing terrorists and invading foreign countries, but not to global warming?

  43. 43.

    David Hunt

    Isn’t it funny that the 1% doctrine applies to torturing terrorists and invading foreign countries, but not to global warming?

    Like all the doctrines of the current Maladministration, they are only to be applied to situation where they advance your pre-conceived agenda. There’s always a contradictory doctrine that can be applied if one doesn’t fit the current situation. Doublethink is must in the Executive Branch, these days.

  44. 44.

    bago

    I have drowned before, and the really horrifying part is when you stop struggling and give up, sinking in the lake with lungs full of water.Knowing a few more feet and you would have made it to the ladder.

  45. 45.

    truth machine

    I don’t think that there’s an American alive who wouldn’t acknowledge that waterboarding isn’t torture

    Discounting the triple negative error, this is an immensely ignorant statement.

    I just think a dismayingly high percentage of the population doesn’t have a problem torturing anyone who “might be a terrorist”.

    That is true, but your false dichotomy is stupid.

  46. 46.

    pinola

    A magnificent example of the neocons and other warmongers Hitchens supported. If it doesn’t personally affect me, it must be justified or simply doesn’t exist.

    I’ll give him creds for doing it and writing about it. Now I’m all ears to hear what he has to say for his shameless pimping of the Iraq War and Bush’s Middle East policies.

    PISS on his ‘navy ancestors’ – they woulda kicked the shit out of that bundle of bloated flesh and tossed it overboard.

    If I have missed something here, someone inform me, pls.

  47. 47.

    Dr.BDH

    Bravo, Hitchens, subjecting yourself to near-drowning to prove it is torture. Your next assignment will be to go to hell and let us know if it exists…

  49. 49.

    Singularity

    I am dismayed that I have never seen a video of waterboarding until now. I have been opposed to its use and have always believed that it is torture, of course, but I had never actually seen how it is administered previously. It seems like such a small amount of water. It took maybe a couple of cups to cause Hitchens to forcefully throw his control devices away. He says he has had nightmares ever since.

    Imagine the plight of some Gitmo detainee whose only crime is being on the wrong side of a U.S.-backed warlord. He has no connection to any terrorist organization, but his captors have a vested interest in proving that he was not imprisoned erroneously. And they have this horrible tool at their disposal.

    I am disgusted by the people of my country, including myself. We have proof that our government, IN OUR NAME, has been using horrific torture to extricate confessions from people at Guantanamo Bay. We also have proof that our government has been imprisoning people based on bad information at Guantanamo Bay. How is it possible for these things to be true and yet there is no mass public outcry against this? If a similar program were instituted aganist people of the same ethnic persuasion as Timothy McVeigh after his terrorist attack, how long do you suppose our political leaders would be our political leaders? We are a racist society with unspeakable morals.

  50. 50.

    Phoenician in a time of Romans

    It’s just weird how quickly they fall back on to the “ticking time bomb” scenario. Like EVERYONE the American government captures is not JUST a terrorist, but is a terrorist who knows all about whatever terrorism plans are next on the queue, undoubtedly ready to go within mere weeks (but more likely days or hours) at the most.

    You know, there’s a chance that any soldier captured in Iraq might know of military plans to attack the resistance fighters in the very near future, and probably a larger one than any random “terrorist”. Surely this logic justifies Iraqis torturing American prisoners of war in Iraq?

  51. 51.

    Redleg

    Bravo to Hitchens for seeing for himself. Perhaps his new insight will make him a less bitter person.

  52. 52.

    kvenlander

    Hitchens is just getting ready to turn into an Obama administration sycophant. Gotta move with the times!

  53. 53.

    Phil Paine

    As far as I’m concerned, speaking as a Canadian, and applying what I consider fundamental morality to my own country, the issue is simple and straighforward. Any government official, policeman, or military person who 1)tortured anyone, 2)attempted to organize or facilitate torture, 3)attempted to conceal present or cover up past torture, 4)attempted to construct a legal framework to justify or permit torture, or 5)aided and abetted torture in way.. should be tried for treason. If the Canadian government operated something like Gitmo, I cannot see how armed revolution and the overthrow of such an obscene, treasonous tyranny would not be justified — nay, the duty of any true patriot.

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  2. […] Also from BJ, I think it’s sad that Cristopher Hitchens has to try it out to figure out that waterboarding is torture. And I don’t like Hitchens, his attitude, and some of his politics. But if there is an honest doubter left, let him read this piece. […]