Friday, July 04, 2008

Scotch and Waterboarding


Back from a few days in the mountain backwoods of Beautiful British Columbia to find Red Tory's reminder that there are few things as stomach churning as a once, seemingly enlightened man who turned to the dark side of neo-conservatism. When it comes to that descent, the poster boy is surely Vanity Fair's own neo-American, Christopher ("Bitch") Hitchens.

In the latest VF, Bitchens samples what he claims to be the "technique" of waterboarding for a whole eleven seconds. That, it seems, is enough for the lard-assed clown to declare it full-fledged "torture."

In reality, Bitchens never got close to actual waterboarding, not even remotely. Chubbo's taste of the "technique" was as sanitized, safe and serene, yes serene, as it could possibly be made. He was brought into a room, blindfolded, and gently laid on a board. He was strapped down and given metal rods to hold in each hand, the release of which would immediately end the demonstration. He was also given a "safety" word which would likewise immediately call the whole thing off.

Bitchens started off knowing that it was all a stunt and nothing more. It was like Ronald Reagan's experience with actual combat - non-existant, completely staged (unlike Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Gonzales, Rice, Feith, Perle et al who didn't even stage it but zealously waged it vicariously).

What Bitchens didn't experience, in his manful 11-seconds of resistance, was the real red-hot poker of all torture - the psychological part, the abject fear and helplessness. He wasn't bullied and tormented, for weeks or months; beaten and deprived of dignity, sleep or sanity; being made to believe he'd either be killed or that death was possible, even likely; before being manhandled into the place of torture or seeming execution, thrown on a board and relentlessly tortured, again and again.

In January, 2007, I did this post on waterboarding, an account that Bitchens and his ilk chose to ignore:

In Germany there is a complaint before the courts against former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld over torture during his time at the Pentagon. Included in the materials is this account of waterboarding taken from the 1958 memoir of French journalist Henri Alleg. Any doubts about waterboarding as full-bore torture are put to rest by Alleg's account:

"Together they picked up the plank to which I was attached and carried me into the kitchen. They rested the top of the plank, where my head was, against the sink. Lo - fixed a rubber tube to the metal tap, which shone just above my face. He wrapped my head in a rag and held my nose. He tried to jam a pice of wood between my lips in such a way that I could not close my mouth or spit out the tube. When everything was ready, he said to me, 'When you want to talk, all you have to do is move your fingers.' And he turned on the tap.

"The rag was soaked rapidly. Water flowed everywhere: in my mouth, in my nose, all over my face. But for a while I could still breathe in some small gulps of air. I tried, by contracting my throat, to take in as little water as possible and to resist suffocation by keeping air in my lungs as long as I could. But I couldn't hold on for more than a few moments. I had the impression of drowning, and a terrible agony, that of death itself, took possession of me. In spite of myself, all the muscles of my body struggled uselessly to save myself from suffociation. In spite of myself, the fingers of my two hands shook uncontrollably. 'That's it! He's going to talk,' said a voice.

"The water stopped running and they took away the rag. I was able to breathe. In the gloom, I saw the lieutenants and the captain, who, with a cigarette between his lips, was hitting my stomach with his fist to make me throw up the water I had swallowed. Befuddled by the air I was breathing, I hardly felt the blows. "Well then?' I remained silent. 'He's playing games with us! Put his head under again!'

"This time I clenched my fists, forcing the nails into my palm. I had decided I was not going to move my fingers again. It was better to die of asphyxiation right away. I feared to undergo again that terrible moment when I felt myself losing consciousness, while at the same time fighting with all my might not to die. I did not move my hands, but three times I again knew this insupportable agony.

"In extremis, they let me get my breath back while I threw up the water. The last time, I lost consciousness."

Bitchens, who revels in the expanse of his superior intellect, completely overlooks the real issue about torture - the link between the humanity of people and the real justice of their cause. Torture is abandonment of humanity and virtue and reduces what might have been a just cause to a sordid, mass infliction of carnage.

Yes, waterboarding is torture as anyone who has bothered spending even a couple of hours on Google will know beyond any doubt. Yes, the United States has used waterboarding and a vast repertoire of other torture techniques on "suspects" in its War on Terror. And, yes, our own government has taken sides, falling in with the waterboarders in January of this year:

"ForeignAffairs Minister Maxime Bernier lashed out Saturday at a controversial document identifying the U.S. and Israel as countries it suspects of practising torture, calling it "wrong" and demanding it be rewritten.

"I regret the embarrassment caused by the public disclosure of the manual used in the department's torture awareness training," said Bernier in a statement.

"It contains a list that wrongly includes some of our closest allies. I have directed that the manual be reviewed and rewritten," said Bernier."

After his publicity stunt on a plank, Bitchens came back to his senses, essentially dismissing waterboarding as torture "foreplay" and praising the heroes of the "highly honorable group" who serve as the practitioners of these Dark Arts:

"The team who agreed to give me a hard time in the woods of North Carolina belong to a highly honorable group. This group regards itself as out on the front line in defense of a society that is too spoiled and too ungrateful to appreciate those solid, underpaid volunteers who guard us while we sleep. These heroes stay on the ramparts at all hours and in all weather, and if they make a mistake they may be arraigned in order to scratch some domestic political itch. Faced with appalling enemies who make horror videos of torture and beheadings, they feel that they are the ones who confront denunciation in our press, and possible prosecution. As they have just tried to demonstrate to me, a man who has been waterboarded may well emerge from the experience a bit shaky, but he is in a mood to surrender the relevant information and is unmarked and undamaged and indeed ready for another bout in quite a short time. When contrasted to actual torture, waterboarding is more like foreplay. No thumbscrew, no pincers, no electrodes, no rack. Can one say this of those who have been captured by the tormentors and murderers of (say) Daniel Pearl? On this analysis, any call to indict the United States for torture is therefore a lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilization and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out, and ultimately to bring it down. I myself do not trust anybody who does not clearly understand this viewpoint.

Safely back at the shop with his whiskey and cigarettes, the neo-con poster boy wasted no time in shredding any notion of contrition and instead lavished praise on torturers. This final paragraph, full of its own deceptions, speaks volumes for the character of this hack.

What is "heroic" about being a torturer? Is it that they run the risk of getting soiled by the bodily fluids of their victims? They don't man ramparts, they scurry about the deepest cellars like vermin.

Bitchens presumes to speak for "a man who has been waterboarded" while not truly having been waterboarded himself, not even remotely. He uses his 11-second stunt as a benchmark by which torture can be measured, even dismissed. He even presumes that those actually waterboarded have undergone the same experience as he did - no softening up, no beatings, no alternate forms of torture - when that's precisely what they get for days, for weeks or even longer. And sorry Bitch but a guy waterboarded will tell you anything, anything he thinks you want to hear and what you hear will bear little resemblance to fact. Even the FBI has shown that.

In Bitchens' view, so long as the United States remains just shy of those who tormented and ultimately beheaded Daniel Pearl, any call to indict America's leaders for torture is "lame and diseased."

I don't think eleven seconds was nearly enough.

4 comments:

Real_PHV_Mentarch said...

It does say a lot about a society whereby its most pro-war and pro-torture adherents can't change their minds unless they undergo a mild, toned down version of torture ...

The Mound of Sound said...

What struck me about the article is that Hitchens appeared to have had an epiphany only to do a profound 180 in his final paragraph.

He conveniently maintains that waterboarding is an effective interrogation technique when it's been repeatedly and conclusively shown to extract false information and forced confessions.

If it doesn't have a legitimate intelligence purpose, and it doesn't, that then reveals its real purpose - the infliction of unbearable suffering, a form of sado-masochistic payback. I think even Hitchens accepted the perverted sexual dimension of torture when he referred to waterboarding as torture "foreplay."

LeDaro said...

Great post, as usual.

Unknown said...

awsome post -