Hitchens: Waterboarding isn’t very nice and may, in fact, be torture
Wednesday, 2 July 2008
I can’t work out whether Christopher Hitchens‘ decision to undergo waterboarding for a piece in Vanity Fair is (a) brave and vital or (b) self-serving and pointless.
On the whole, I’m not sure the sight of Hitchens flailing around with dribble down his front adds any level of enlightenment to the “debate” about this method of torture (which some view as mere “extreme interrogation”). But I suppose the point is that a lot of people aren’t enlightened and for this reason at least, it may have been worth doing.
Hitchens delivers an elegant article about his experience, although why he felt he had to go down the “gonzo” route in order to write it is not explained. Surely the following could have been arrived at by talking to victims:
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 video of Hitchens being waterboarded is at the Vanity Fair website.
Amnesty International has also produced an excellent short film about waterboarding called The Stuff of Life, which is no less “real” than the Hitchens video and arguably more impactful:
No. 1 — July 3rd, 2008 at 9:49 am
Perhaps the VF editor just thought it would be karmically just to give a chickenhawk like Hitchens a taste of what he supports.
And surely ‘the sight of Hitchens flailing around with dribble down his front’ is merely one repeated in any right-wing newspaper on a weekly basis.
No. 2 — August 4th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
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