Christopher Hitchens actually had himself waterboarded by the US Military to see whether it felt like torture to him. It did.
via Pharyngula, who has links to video.
34 Responses to “Waterboarding Hitchens”
Leave a Reply
Please read the comments policy. If you would like an icon beside your comment, please register a Gravatar.
There is a Comments Preview function below the typing box which activates when you start typing.
Pretty disturbing to watch.
Actually, I find myself impressed and somewhat endeared towards ol’ Bumface now.
Must take shower.
Here, take this antidote that I just found and posted over at Hoyden as well:
I can see that point, but I’m not entirely swayed by it. Perhaps Hitchens decided that he needed to get tortured so that he could describe it eloquently from personal experience. I do take this author’s point that Hitchens is both downplaying his previous dismissal of the argument that waterboarding constitutes torture and neglecting to unequivocally state that he was wrong.
Bolta says it’s a sign of an enlightened society that they only use forms of torture that people will voluntarily undergo, and that they only use them on really bad people. True stupidity knows no bounds.
“neglecting to unequivocally state that he was wrong”
That’s what stuck in my craw too. It was as if we were expected to take it all as his first public stance on the issue.
But he and lots of other folks know the history, and that’s what gives it the piquancy – there is honour in saying “I don’t think it’s that bad, but I’ll find out for sure”, then getting all turned around on the issue by experience.
The underlying problem, as your helpful antidote points out, is that he’s probably still the same sort of person – willing to make unfounded and tendentious judgement calls.
Is Bolt saying that Hitchens is both bad and gullible? Hitchens towers above Bolt in journalistic achievement. I mean, he understands poems and novels and really old books and expresses his affection for them in public.
I think Chris Hitchens may be recognising some writing that is well and truly on the wall in the US. With Obama as the Democratic Presidential candidate, he has to bury the hatchet with the Clintons, who will do a last lap of honour at the Denver primaries and then move to the margins of US politics. This would mean that an old school Trotskyist such as Hitchens no longer has any reason to be giving aid and comfort to the right.
It also suggests that John McCain may be DOA in the US election, as right-wing pundits such as Pat Buchanan have been saying for a while. Their view is that all Obama has to do is not be scary to the swing voters and the Presidency is his, as it was for Nixon in ‘68 and Reagan in ‘80, as the other side is now so decrepit and riven with splits.
You have to hope his next VF piece doesn’t involve deciding whether it’s people or guns that kill folk.
Yes Tobias, how ironic/moronic of Bolt to reflexively defend this sanctioned method of torture by the USA…
As Hitchens made clear afterwards, waterboarding is controlled drowning. The severity of torture is in the hands of the torturer, who can choose anything from simply causing you extreme pain, to causing you extreme pain for prolonged periods of time resulting in respiratory and brain damage, to killing you outright.
How sophisticated and enlightened!
Hitchens had mechanisms to make the whole thing stop (and lasted about 30secs). That is just one key difference in the waterboarding he ‘volunteered’ for, and waterboarding as torture.
You wouldn’t volunteer to have your ‘toenails pulled out with red-hot pincers’, because to actually undergo that procedure, there’s no room for ’stop’.
Also amusing (not very given the subject matter) Bolt’s post linked to a source that refutes his own argument. He obviously put a lot of thought into this one!
One characteristic of Hitchens’ writing that occasionally irritates me is his use of harsh “snap” judgements of persons. Not sure if this developed during his Trotskyite phase or whether he was of that ilk in any case and so drawn towards Trotskyism – or towards harsh, unforgiving “revolutionary” politics?
Anyway, it’s a minor flaw. I think mostly he reasons his way through issues quite adequately. Explains himself.
Why should he make peace with the Clintons, if he still regards them as corrupt and unlovely? (Am I learning from his glibness…oh dear….)
My point wasn’t that Chris Hitchens needs to make peace with the Clinton, but that the Clintons are sliding into political irrelevancy. This will be the case even if Obama loses the 08 election, as the ‘Clinton model’ that dominated the Democratic Party from the late 80s to now will not be resurrected. It was designed for a time when liberals were on the defensive politically, and there has been a significant shift in the US in relation to this during the time of the Bush presidency.
No-one in the US wants to be associated with Bush any more, and even conservatives are very reluctant to be associated with McCain. By contrast, ‘Brand Obama’ is the hot ticket of the moment. Check how quickly all the Clinton-supporting celebrities are now jumping ship to be with Barack. Chris Hitchens, like all of the Vanity Fair, Salon, Slate types, want to be in the slipstream of Obamamania, at least for the next four months.
I saw an anchor from Fox News or CNN or somesuch volunteer to undergo waterboarding, and he came to the exact opposite conclusion from Hitchens.
I think the bottom line is if it was that heinous journalists wouldn’t queue up to say ‘gimme a go at that’. When they decide to have their elbows tied together behind their back so they touch and left for days on end (the reason McCain cannot raise his arms above his head anymore) i’ll start thinking waterboarding is morally equivalent to other torture methods.
That said, I agree with the FBI that you can get a lot further with interogation methods that seek to get on the suspects good side, and ‘enhanced interrogation’ leads to junk information.
> I saw an anchor from Fox News or CNN or somesuch volunteer to undergo waterboarding, and he came to the exact opposite conclusion from Hitchens.
Yeah, but Faux News anchors don’t really qualify as sentient.
Now that approval of America’s new pro-torture policy is sufficiently mainstream, Mr Iconoclast can rebel against it.
An egotistical publicity stunt from a ‘drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay’ (George Galloway’s description) whose being wrong about most things has led to his increasing irrelevance. The fact that he couldn’t figure it out without undergoing the procedure says it all. Yawn.
(With apologies to the other Nick for stealing his identity)
Stephen Lloyd, you’re simply echoing the White House’s defence of waterboarding – “see, this is what it is…it’s not so bad…it’s just water after all…it’s justifiable”.
McCain had his elbows tied together etc for days on end. But you think waterboarding isn’t carried out for hours and intermittently days/weeks/months on end? Of course it is.
Prolonged waterboarding causes serious permanent physical damage – it’s no different to the McCain example you used.
The CIA have banned it. The Pentagon have banned it. The FBI apparently don’t use it. The UN have declared it abhorrent and hypocritical. It breaches international human rights law.
It happens at Guantanamo Bay.
BTW is it pretty much the same method as the “water torture” some folk accused the Australian Army of using on a Viet Cong suspect circa 1965, which incident got the young Malcolm Fraser (Army Minister?) into difficulties?
just askin’
The Yanks aren’t the only ones who resort to dodgy practices.
just sayin’
“I think the bottom line is if it was that heinous journalists wouldn’t queue up to say ‘gimme a go at that’”
I disagree. Is is only because they DON’T believe it IS heinous that they do line up to give it a go.
If it were something they could believe was painful and horrible then no way in the world would they be volunteering to do it.
War and Words: The Australian Press and the Vietnam War – Chapter 5: The ‘Water Torture Incident’, October 1966
Stephen Lloyd @ 11. You obviously haven’t watched the tape.
Not torture! Not even punishment! Lol.
Thanks Nick.
For anybody unconvinced of the barbarity of this American torture it should be noted that what Hitchens so very briefly experienced is only the merest shadow of what is done in real life; in real American torutre chambers at such places as Abu Graib, Guantanamo, Bahgram etc.
Happy 4th of July Sour Ole Chris!
Remember when Sour Ole Chris’ puss used to pop up just about every time we turned on a major news channel? Whether you agree or disagree with waterboarding, it’s clear Hitchens has now resorted to a publicity stunt to resurrect his tanking career after his seminal debacle, God is Not Great.
I read the atheist manifesto cover to cover. What stuck out the most in my mind was his assertion that our founding fathers intentionally left God out of our nation’s original political fabric. This is a lie. I quote from that shot across the bow of the British, the Declaration of Independence:
“When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve political bands which have connected them with another, and assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal status to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness…
“We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solomnly publish and declare, that these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States…”
Jefferson, the man who brought us this God-filled message of freedom, may well have toasted to his final declarative words, “…our sacred Honor.”, with a glass of Virginia’s finest. As a citizen of the United States, I will raise a glass to the consecrated Honor that is ours and to the assurances proclaimed by our nation’s framers.
Happy Forth of July, Sour Ole Chris, wherever you are!
George Kotarides, Jr
Author: A Day in God’s Country
Waterboarding Hitchens?
Where do I sign?!
Filing this one under “Duh!”
Next week: Hitchens listens to Vogon poetry!
maybe next he can sign up for a good bit of truncheon rogery, a la Mamdouh Habib’s experience in Guantanamo Bay. Then they can render him to some polite Syrian boys, and when they’re done with that they can chuck him in a shipping crate in the desert with a bunch of talibs, and bury him in an unmarked grave once he’s cooked to death.
He had the chance to stop it with a safe word, and he only changed his tune on whether or not it was torture after he experienced it. He’s one of the real empathic intellects of our time, isn’t he?
nick,
there’s an account of the “water torture” of Viet Cong woman To Thi Nau in 1966, which lead to headlines in Australia in 1968, in Paul Ham’s recent book “Vietnam The Australian War” on pp.411-3.
It seems she “swallowed less than a cup [of water]“. Abu Ghraib: compare and contrast. Australian officers ordered it cease. Reporters were outside the tent, didn’t actually see what was done to her.
Big brouhaha in Australia over it. My guess is that her gender would have been a factor in the general disgust.
cheerio
ROFL George Kotarides, Jr – how’s that barrow working out for you?
“Next week: Hitchens listens to Vogon poetry!”
Thank you!
George Packer has an interesting and nuanced piece on Hitchens’ flaws – and strengths – at the New Yorker.
thanks Nick: I agree that Hitchens’ writing has many strengths. Cheers.
Can I waterboard Hitchens too?
…
Terry: “My point wasn’t that Chris Hitchens needs to make peace with the Clinton, but that the Clintons are sliding into political irrelevancy.”
Really? Ya think?
“This will be the case even if Obama loses the 08 election, as the ‘Clinton model’ that dominated the Democratic Party from the late 80s to now will not be resurrected.”
Hmmm, the smart money sez the Democratic Party itself is not the same critter it was in the late 80s.
My own highly suspect and HP-Lovecraftian prediction is that both the GOP and the Dems, as parties, are headed for the scrap heap. Look for new party re-alignments in this century.
“But doth suffer a sea change,
Into something
Rich and strange…”
Hark now I hear them, ding-dong, bell.
Monolithic Hitchens’ drunken, polemic screeds are florid reflections of a castaway which, to me, allay concerns that anyone other than collectively anesthetized disciples or William Golding’s Jack might find them decorous at least or useful at most. Perhaps once possessing some degree of relevance, Ole Sour-puss has gone the way of reality TV. Good riddance.
I saw Fox News or CNN or somesuch.
It was torture.
I guess these doughty anchorpersons insisted that their “enhanced interrogators” not stop the “experiment” even if they begged them to.
Please, SL, check in with reality every now and then.
Katz,
do you mean it was torture for you to WATCH teh CNN, Fox News….