Notes from under water

Christopher Hitchens is waterboarded for Vanity Fair¹ and comes up for air to proclaim

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.

Well, quite; but I still find it astonishing that anybody questions whether waterboarding is torture, or that Hitchens needed to be waterboarded before he realised something that should be blindingly obvious to anybody paying attention. The chronically stupid are likely to wheel out their usual protests, which is that any procedure that somebody like Hitchens would volunteer for can’t possibly be torture.² A quick glimpse at the indemnification contract that he had to sign should set their minds at rest:

“Water boarding” is a potentially dangerous activity in which the participant can receive serious and permanent (physical, emotional and psychological) injuries and even death, including injuries and death due to the respiratory and neurological systems of the body.

So where does that leave us? In absolutely the same place as we started. Kudos to Hitchens for going through with this, but it’s not going to change the mind of anybody who’s already put their chips in with torture, and it’s too late to undo the damage that’s been done by admitting waterboarding into the repertoire to begin with.

The truly insidious nature of torture is only hinted at in Hitchen’s piece:

As if detecting my misery and shame, one of my interrogators comfortingly said, “Any time is a long time when you’re breathing water.” I could have hugged him for saying so, and just then I was hit with a ghastly sense of the sadomasochistic dimension that underlies the relationship between the torturer and the tortured.

It’s not about what torture can do for your country, it’s about what torture does to your country; but maybe that’s not a concern for people who would trade in their security for a taste of the action.

1. Presumably they quizzed him about his expenses claims. [↩]
2. You can read more monkey at the comments on Harry’s Place, with delightful insights such as “It is an interesting and fair question, though, if waterboarding qualifies as torture, but you’d need to get the answer from tough people, people who have been trained to resist captors and pain” - because apparently you need to be an trained expert to tell if you’re being tortured. [↩]