Best comment on the Hitchens waterboarding stunt (UPDATE for comparison)
You maybe saw where Christopher Hitchens submitted himself to waterboarding and got a videotape made and wrote an article about in Vanity Fair. He says, yep, it’s torture.
He seems to have recovered pretty well. Occasionally has trouble sleeping.
Gee, I sure do hope Khaled Sheikh Mohammed isn’t having any of those lingering after-effects. I’d be pretty sad to learn he wasn’t sleeping soundly.
I hope the people in the Library Tower in LA are sleeping OK, too.
Me, I’m gonna go with the Weasel on this one:
I can see agreeing to waterboarding for an article like the one Hitchens was writing.
On the other hand, crippling electric shocks, probably not.
Nobody wants this to become commonplace. It’s not, and it won’t, and I don’t think the American public outside of law schools and Berkeley are losing even as much sleep over this as Hitchens is.
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UPDATE: COMPARE AND CONTRAST: I remembered something from a while back on Hot Air. Here’s Fox’s Steve Harrigan getting a more intensive demonstration of waterboarding in November of 2006. He’s handling it a bit better than Hitchens did. “GHAACK! OH CRAP THAT WAS HORRIBLE! Okay, let’s try phase three.”
He seems fine now. No word on how he’s sleeping.
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{Post by See-Dubya}
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Correction to my last post - I meant to say
“that is moral relevancy at its worst” (not equivalence)
Nope, not going to go off on a tangent here.
I would LOVE for Al Qaeda to use waterboarding on our soldiers!!!!
No, I’m COMPLETELY SERIOUS!!! As compared to finding a soldiers dismembered body??
Bring it on, I’m sure that they’ll all agree as well
Harry Star
My apologies for not responding earlier…. I thank you for your kind words and I am humbled by same.
I didn’t equate them, you inferred that.
My point is that, while noble, continuously trying to prove your civility against a barbaric enemy hell-bent on killing you is like fighting with one arm behind your back. You wouldn’t suggest that our Army start using rubber bullets and stun guns, even though it would be considered more humane.
Waterboarding, by comparison to what Al Qaeda does do, as MNUSMCDavid mentioned, is more humane. Much more.
So, if you’re giving me the choice of subjecting Americans to waterboarding instead of to what they are subjected, it’s an easy choice.
Oh, and my argument would only intellectually dishonest if I was facing overwhelming evidence to the contrary and knew my rhetoric to be false. I could be called guilty of sarcastic hyperbole, but not intellectual dishonesty (IMHO).
I apologize if it caused offense.
I read the article on Vanity Fair.
It should come as no surprise to you guys that I like a great deal of what Hitchens has to say, I don’t always agree with him, but I often do.
It has been pointed out by a few previous commentators that Hitchens is not our enemy here.
His article in Vanity Fair doesn’t overtly offer a personal viewpoint; he just addresses both sides of the issue. Also, the quote from #78 absolutely demonstrates that Hitchens is a complex and intelligent individual that understands the arguments. He is not some far-left American hater.
Is water boarding torture?
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/torture
By the strictest definition, yes it is. The issue is not whether or not it is torture. That is just a silly exercise in semantics. The issue is whether or not it is acceptable torture. I think it is.
As Hitchens points out, those that use the word “torture” have an agenda to contort moral equivalence. This is why there is such a debate over the word itself.
I am curious to know what Hitchen’s own opinion is now. I understood from the following:
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/people,1119,christopher-hitchens-tries-water-boarding,33570
that Hitchens supported water boarding and this is what led him to try it. I wonder if he still agrees.
Bluesoc:
Ahh, very good thought experiment, I had to give it some thought but this is what I came up with:
No, it is not OK for AQ to use water boarding on Americans but it is OK for us to use it on them (in limited cases). The short answer is because we are justified and they are lunatics that need to be culled from the population of the Earth. We try our very best to do the right thing, but sometimes there are grey areas. The very fact that we understand this as Americans makes us infinitely better than AQ who wouldn’t even consider the debate on the topic and which is why they prefer sawing off people’s head to water boarding.
To those calling Hitchens names:
You guys do realize that Hitchens has been on our side when it comes to the war, right?
Great post, zeroangel. Many great points there.
bluesoc, to dismiss the issue is intellectually dishonest.
“Battlefields are much different than prisons….?” Lame.
I won’t get into your fallacy of false dilemma here. Instead, I’ll respond to torture in and of itself. Can it work? Sure. Does it often? No. The reason it does not work is that people under duress will more likely say that which will end their pain. Other psychological techniques work far better than torture. Read Army FM 2-22.3 sometime. It’ll enlighten you as to the other approved methods of interrogation. Frankly, torture is laziness. KSM did give us information, but how much was it and how much of a role did “torture” play in this? This is debatable. You make quite an assumption that KSM’s testimony under duress was the sole bit of data we needed to fill out intel gaps. I find this hard to believe. I’d argue that the other techniques and methods used, such as multiple questioners, routine breaking, and psychological techniques (i.e. Ego-up, emotional pride, Fear-up or down, etc.) played a more significant role.
Nice textbook fallacy of relevance. Your comments here say nothing in respect to my argument. My argument is this: Torture, from a practical standpoint, is not an effective method of intel gathering. We have far better methods than this. Torture, just like the idea of “kill’em all and let God sort them out”, is counterproductive. When we’re fighting a counterinsurgency, not for hearts and minds, but in terms of fear, trust, and respect, we should focus more on trust and respect than fear. Fear chases people away, back to the enemy. Again, I point to the Battle of Algiers as my historical example of this. Sure, we haven’t killed anyone from torture; however, the psychological effect on the populace with whom we are working is just the same. This is why Abu Ghurayb was the strategic blow to our strategic and operational efforts in Iraq.
Perception and reality of torture both have the same effects: both deliver a serious blow to our information operations and psychological operations. And why do it when it’s not as effective anyway in getting human intelligence?
Um, hello?
We’re not talking about getting signed confessions. We’re talking about getting actionable, verifiable intelligence. If someone gives you verifiable intelligence in order to end their pain, then I would consider that working.
my brother in law is in the Navy and was water boarded for part of his training..
yes, his TRAINING..
he says it is a form of torture but the current administration should have never disclosed the information that water boarding was a technique on getting information.
So what?
We had all kinds of forms of coercion used in SERE training school up in Washington that I had to go through as aircrew.
What it does is kick in a drowning response, and that causes a panic reaction. Its physiological and cannot be controlled. And that kicks in a fear response, which is what breaks the person.
This is NOT torture - there is no damage to the body, no permanent harm physically or mentally, other than learning that you can be broken, just like any other human.
Hitchens and anyone else that says this is torture is full of crap.
Salt:
Thank you very much. Awfully kind of you.
Dave:
It seems Hitchens agrees with your brother, this is from the last paragraph of his article:
Basically waterboarding is just another tool for interrogation along with ego issues. Waterboarding can be used to induce the first small break if other methods have not been productive, or if time is limited.
The first break is the one from which other methods will proceed, especially ego based methods, because the first break is emotionally humiliating and beats the crap out of your ego.
Thats why we have such methods as part of sere training, to teach you how to deal with such things. Luckily for us, the egos of terrorist leaders seem to be one of their main driving factors.
Ordinary Coloradan:
I said above in #104, I think the debate on whether or not the definition of the word torture requires
is not the issue.
As is obvious from this string of comments, at issue here is:
what, exactly, is torture?
Some people think it’s any means of extracting information from an unwilling subject.
Some think it’s only things that cause pain or bodily damage.
As long as there is this disparity, there will be folks who believe waterboarding is torture, those who do not, and those who aren’t sure.
If that’s what he and the left are saying, I guess we’d better ban divorce, children (wait, they’re already trying that), being employed, traffic jams, bad weather, ……. (fill in the emotional blank).
Next thing you know, he’ll be having a baby….
What would it take? how about for them to begin ACTING and BEHAVING like human beings? That would be a great place to start.
And would I want Al Wueda to begin waterboarding their hostages? If it means they stop doing all the other horrendous, truly torturous things they already have been doing, where the dismembered and burned bodies are found dumped in garbage piles and on the sides of the road, or hung from bridges after being drug behind cars and spit on, urinated on and worse…then yes. If you are making it a choice, then I choose the waterboarding.
as for listing Algeirs as a means of showing that Waterboarding is deadly and then eliminating how it is done now, versus then, you are just plain irrelevant. You are trying to say that it is done the same way, and without regard for the prisoner’s life. Considering you cannot show that the same numbers exist today as then, your entire argument is as ridiculous as everything else you have stated.
I have also experienced the many pleasures associated with SERE school.
I’ve often argued that waterboarding is NOT torture.
Many activities at SERE school sucked. As a matter of fact, if you surveyed all SERE graduates, many might choose to be waterboarded rather than repeat some of those other activities. That doesn’t mean that all of those other activities were torture simply because they sucked more.
However, I’ve also stated that I do not believe the U.S. should utilize such techniques. I firmly believe that we should clearly maintain the high ground with respect to the treatment of prisoners. This allows us to demand that our prisoners are treated in like manner (and aggressively respond when they are not).
However, I don’t think poorly of those that disagree with me about its use. And I definitely don’t agree with demonizing any policies which allowed it to occur.
Very well said, Mark Jaquith. Waterboarding by the Japanese was tried as a war crime. We prosecuted them for it.
Honestly just reverse the roles, if our American Soldiers were taken by N. Korea or China, or Iran, and they did this to extract information, we would rightly condemn them.
SERE training is something that you get after volunteering to be an aircrew member. You accept it because it is vital to know how to deal with being captured and tortured, and harshly interrogated. It is a vastly different experience to be some afghani farmer or iraqi goatherd picked up because some other guy in his village harbored a grudge. Then thrown into what his simple rural mind could only imagine as hell. (sodomized by a banana?? electrodes??)
I don’t understand your point. Are you implying that waterboarding is ok to do to people that volunteer for some type of combat but not ok to do to those that didn’t volunteer for anything (e.g. the farmer)?
thutmose81 said:
So is it the Afghani farmer, or the Iraqi goatherd that, when released from Gitmo, went back to Iraq and suicide bombed a bunch of people?
I know you like to imagine that these folks in Gitmo are there for no good reason. Perhaps there are even a small number for which that is the case. But as recent events have clearly shown, many are there for very GOOD reason. . .that they are terrorists.
corkie;
Forgive me I certainly don’t mean what I’m about to say as flippant … but, war is horrible and deadly and cruel and unfair…. you play by Marquis of Queensbury rules, you die. Yes, I am aware of Geneva, Rules of Engagement and other limitations…. but it is still war. I am damn glad I followed those protocols to a minimum and sometimes not at all, for me and my squad. If that makes me horrible… and inhuman, I can live with it. I’m just tired of this sophmoric exercise in this whole thing of waterboarding crap.
I certainly concur with your last sentence. This waterboarding discussion is a joke. If forced to decide, I would absolutely choose waterboarding over incarceration (which liberals don’t seem to lose any sleep over).
I understand war is hell and that perfect protocols are difficult to establish for our warriors. However, ‘commander perspective’ (the big picture) often requires certain trade-offs. Since Vietnam, volumes have been written about the constraints put on the warrior - most agree that not all constraints are bad.
Overall, I believe that the US should treat its prisoners well - and, with very few exceptions, I think it does. However, I think we lose more than we gain when we don’t. There are too many idiot liberals out there ready and willing to exploit every single exception.
I don’t want the US to seem like a weak pushover. I want the US to be a shining beacon for the rest of the world. Waterboarding is NOT torture (I will continue to fervently argue this point), but it can scratch some of the shine.
To repeat, I don’t think poorly of those that disagree with me. You are not inhuman.
Jesus, I am appalled every time I read liberal pukes equating us with our enemies.
It is stunningly obtuse ( and I think a purposeful misdirection) to claim that “Chinese water torture” or what the Japanese did has anything to do what WE engage in when we “waterboard”
WE DO NOT LET WATER GET INTO the person’s lungs.
WE DO NOT KILL the person we are interrogating after we waterboard them.
Japanese and Chinese routinely did.
THAT’s why the Japanese were considered war criminals, you effing morons, not for the act of waterboarding but for torturing to the point of drowning, and then going all the way and drowning or otherwise killing the prisoners.
We, OTOH, try to scare the carp out of the person being interrogated by giving him the sensation of, and the fear of, being drowned.
And John McCain’s got nothing to add here: he says “torture” doesn’t work, but in his autobio he says every man has a breaking point, and he broke.
Pain from real physical torture is what broke McCain. FEAR is what we used to break the sheikh.
For those who claim “torture” doesn’t work, I ask where do you get the wisdom NOT shared by the hundreds of human generations that have used it?
I know, it’s the same liberals who think THEY have a lock on all that is good and true and moral.
Corkie
Thank you, I just have a problem with this penchant for misconstruing the ” beacon on a hill” thing…. yes, we are the best country and people in the world…. but we should never be seen as weaklings who won’t snap a neck if the cause calls for it. I guess that is my irritation, rational or not.
It seems that when most folks discuss the techniques used, as to what worked or didn’t, they’re long on opinion and lacking of fact. Anyone here personally know the answer? Turn off your issue labelling guns for a few minutes and consider one recent source.
When the NY Slimes outed Deuce Martinez, they portrayed what he thought of “harsh” techniques yet he is not at liberty to confirm or deny what they wrote. If you bought that and repeat it as the basis for your arguments, sorry, the Slimes is currently laying off propagandists left and left. Every word in that article was written to further the Slimes’ political agenda and make money in the process.
Consider the story of how KSM was captured, even if their basic facts are accurate (and we have no way of knowing they are), look at how they told it. It was if all the “torture” and interrogating of “detainees” and the billions we have spent on intelligence equipment was a waste of time and money, only resulting in America looking bad in the eyes of the world (snif, snif). Had Bush and his hideous henchmen only read all “detainees” their rights and waited by their Blackberries for somebody to sell out KSM for $25 million, all would be peachy.
But hey, let’s also out our “hero” Deuce. First, let’s write he thinks the torturers are all knuckle draggers and, being an “egghead,” he would have eventually got all the info out of KSM so no one needed to soften him up. The best part is we have no way of knowing exactly what went through KSM’s mind and the government can’t present the facts to prove us wrong. So, we’ll use dubious (at best) sources to make characterizations of the facts, do a “news” report like our facts are in stone, and suckers will pay to read it all. Deuce should have read KSM his rights, grabbed all the secrets he could steal, come running to us so we could undermine Bush-Hitler, or at least agree to an interview. Let’s make Deuce pay for his failure so the next egghead knows better.
If you want to draw a line in your mind about where interrogation becomes torture and then offer it as opinion, fine, feel free. Yet the arguments over what did and did not work are largely based upon conjecture. That is the mental equal of nailing one foot to the floor, running in a circle for a week, and claiming you got somewhere.
I’ve often seen liberals quote victims of torture that claim they eventually told their interrogators what they wanted to hear. Stupidly, these were usually just forced confessions.
The problem is that liberals don’t know the difference between getting a confession from someone and obtaining actionable intelligence.
For the record, I agree that torture probably doesn’t generate accurate confessions.
However, there is no doubt in my mind that torture produces actionable intelligence. There is also no doubt in my mind that waterboarding (which is not torture) also produced actionable intelligence prior to these leaks.
Yes, subjects can lie. Liberals need to realize that intelligence professionals can recognize some lies immediately. Other lies can be determined by piecing other intelligence together. They should certainly try to understand how an interrogation system functions before they pass judgment regarding the effectiveness of certain tools. And no more anecdotal evidence please?
I [ersonally enjoy this fantasy that these morons have about how little Ahkmed the Goatherder just happened to be out tending his girlfriends…I mean goats, when suddenly, a bunch of Al Qaeda terrorists happened to run into his field and wait there. Poor Ahkmed…as he was standing there, dumbfounded, yelling at them like a new york cabbie for scaring his girl…I mean…herd, along comes the evil U.S. Military and/or CIA Operatives with a great big Warner Brothers’ Cartoon like butterfly net suspended from the bottom of a Blackhawk and scooped them all up…goats and all, whisking them all off straightaway to GitMo, much to the chagrin of poor innocent little Ahkmed.
When they arrived, the net was emptied out into these cages, where Ahkmed…against his will and screaming out his innocense the entire time…was whisked off to the waterboarding treatment, tortured heinously with it while the interrogators all laughed at him and mocked him mercilessly, until they eventualy grow weary of their sadistic fun and release him back out into the wild, only to be sued later for false imprisonment and torture…based solely on the word of Ahkmed.
Seriously…where the Hell do you think these thugs were taken from? They were taken from THE FIELD OF BATTLE!!! There are not a whole lot of “innocents” wandering around the open battlegrounds of Afghanistan folks. And if you think for one minute, that there is not a whole lot of fact checking on their detainees before they even left the country they were picked up in, and if you actually do believe they are whisked away directly to GitMo, did not pass Go, did not collect two hundred Drakmas…then you really need to put down the Hippie Lettuce, because it has done far more damage to that tiny crinled up organ between your ears than any opponent to pot smoking could have ever imagined.
But then again, I suppose when you only deal in emotions and feelings rather than reality and facts…anything is possible in Happy Libby-Land.
Also, if their techniques did not work, and the people being interrogated will say whatever they think the interrogator wants to hear just to make them stop regardless of if it is correct or not…then why the HELL do you think they are still using it? Are you so stuffed into your own world of illusions and conspiricy theories to actually think that the military and/or CIA would routinely and continually use a method of interrogation that not only did not work, but routinely and constantly gave them false or misleading information?
The problem with common sense is…it is not so common, and completely lacking in Liberal circles entirely.
It didn’t hurt him–it just scared the hell out of him! I’d rather be waterboarded than listen to Al Gore talk about Global Warming. Wait a minute—-That’s an idea……..