Let me start by saying that I find Christopher Hitchens, 99% of the time, to be a loathesome little man whose crabbed hateful mentality and penchant for sensationalism is a blot of the worst kind upon journalism. I usually find the stuff he writes to be viscerally repulsive, and discovering that Hitchens is writing to a particular position is 2.5 strikes against that position in my mental playbook.
That said, I commend the following article to anyone to read: Believe Me, It’s Torture: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com
Hitchens tried to examine the question of waterboarding, and whether it is torture, in a very direct fashion: he underwent it himself, at the hands of professionals.
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.
After vividly (and not very self-complementarily) describing how it was, he then cogently and clearly and concisely addresses the arguments by those who support and condemn the practice.
Given that waterboarding is being done by our government ostensibly on behalf of us all, and is supported and defended by members of our government and political candidates, I do think that the subject is worth facing head-on. And as much as I think Hitchens is a jerk of the highest water, given that he’s been willing to go through this in a way that so many of those politicians, and their pundit supporters have not, I have to give him a hell of a lot more credibility than I do them on this subject.
(via Les)
As someone who agrees with Hitchens more than you, but not nearly 100% of the time (and I mightily disagree about the war), this is just the sort of thing that our great leaders ought to have to endure before they allow it to be used.
And as he points out, one is not only drowning, but being suffocated as well. So the information they is gathered must be good, right?
There’s a bizarre dichotomy in information you get from torture — or, rather, the two ways that you can apply torture.
The first is information that’s immediately verifiable. This is used in the “ticking bomb somewhere in New York” scenario, but also for some other immediate intelligence — where someone plans to strike tonight, where the weapons are hidden, etc. You can go out and verify what’s being told pretty quickly. In cases where the situation is dire enough (the ticking bomb scenario), you can argue that it’s justified, and in either case, you’re likely to get good intel (and so claim that “torture works.”
Then there’s the fuzzy data — stuff that the guy can lie about to make you stop torturing him. “Who is a member of your organization?” “What was your goal in doing X?” “Who is second in command of this unit?” This is stuff that cannot be immediately verified or made use of, and it’s exactly the sort of thing that will have very low value from torture because the idea with torture is to say something to make them *stop right now* — whether it’s true or not. And because it’s not quickly verifiable, it turns into a mythical success. “We extract the names of thirty Al Qa’eda agents from him using waterboarding” — never mind whether they really are Al Qa’eda or not.
I think there may be times when you say “Damn the consequences, we need this information immediately, and I’ll take full responsibility for breaking the rules” and you do what you need to do to save the city or find the hostage or whatever. But when there are no consequences to breaking the rules, but torture is simply allowed — it’s going to be used for relatively trivial purposes and with increasingly lower worth of results.
If you’re going to sell your soul, be sure you’re selling it for something worthwhile.
As far as the Hitchens stunt goes — I would have no hesitation of suggesting that the ten top decision-makers on the matter should have to undergo the process. There is, of course, no lasting physical harm (unless you go into cardiac arrest), so no there’s no “permanent” problem with it. If you don’t go through it, you don’t get a voice in setting the policy. Oh, and you need to renew that experience, and decision, every six months — for the next five years, whether you’re in office or not.
If Bush, Cheney, the head of the CIA, the heads of (fill in the blanks) and the heads of the respective Armed Services and Intelligence committees were willing to do that, and still argued that it’s not torture, I’d be willing to accept their judgment on the matter.
Dave, the point has never been to get information, it was to get confessions…true or flase, it didn’t matter. Plus the whole “Ticking Time Bomb – 24” thing is a joke since it is an unlikely scenerio.
Using torture — or even “enhanced pressure techniques” — to extract confessions is just asinine. It epitomizes the fuzzy, unverifiable data, and doesn’t net you anything except a flimsy “he confessed!” claim.
As to the ticking time bomb, that’s the extreme case of operational knowledge that might be of immediate value. That sort of stuff goes stale very quickly, and *should* be unlikely to be justification for breaking the rules.