The August issue of Vanity Fair is set to clear up an important question once and for all: is waterboarding torture? No scientists or military experts were needed for this: just a self-proclaimed "wheezing, paunchy" 59-year-old scribbler. Christopher Hitchens, VF columnist and controversial panelist extraordinaire, who's written previously on the difference between "extreme interrogation" and "outright torture," submitted himself to the technique to make the call.
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Strapped to a board at a house in North Carolina, the dashing author was waterboarded by veterans of the US Special Forces, administering a technique they're usually do while teaching people how to survive. The video is proof; he didn't survive very long. To see his stark proclamation about the proceedings, read more.
His whole description of the event is absolutely worth reading, he sums his feeling up thusly:
I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and—as you might expect — inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the prearranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.
Hitchens concluded: believe me, it’s torture, and closed, "I had only a very slight encounter on that frontier, but I still wish that my experience were the only way in which the words 'waterboard' and 'American' could be mentioned in the same (gasping and sobbing) breath." Do you agree? Does the practice, as Hitchens argues, "open a door that cannot be closed?"
Tara Matthews
Rosato
Benefit
If the Special Forces didn't do it, I would have!
1
me a river.
2Does Carter think Vanity Fair readers can't figure out what's torture by themselves? Other reporters already have done it, and there's a big difference between being waterboarded after establishing a safety signal and being kidnapped, taken to another country and dunked by people who clearly see you as a dangerous enemy.
3I'm sure it does at least slightly 'open a door that cannot be closed.' Once someone has that kind of power over another person, especially one that they consider an enemy, it's not easy to enforce some kind of acceptable limit of torture.
4I would like to know what his preconceptions of waterboarding were.
5If you've ever had a stuffed up head due to sinus infection and you've used a "netty pot" to clean out your sinuses, you know that "waterboarding" is NOT true torture because you have done the same thing to yourself, often repeatedly until your sinus are clear.
There are just too many wusses around today. And I guess VF has more than its share.
Next time I have a sinus infection, maybe I should contact the US Special Forces to clear my head.
Google netty pot, unless you're a wuss.
6Auntie - What you're saying is this guy went in thinking waterboarding was going to be torture, and sure enough, he thought it was?
7Wow I can't believe people are trying to defend the use of this practice. No country should be calling itself a civilised nation while it uses any kind of torture on people. Just because it doesn't look that harmless on tape doesn't mean it couldn't be absolutely petrifying. I've had a sinus infection. At no time did I have a towel held down over my face or was I tied to a board without the use of my hands. At no time was I completely unaware of what officers trained to kill were about to do to me while I was completely defenseless.
8Boys and girls, strap yourselves in, The Coosa-Coaster is back! Yes!
9Auntie Coosa, you're being sarcastic/facetious, right?
Are you actually comparing this horrific means of torture (executed in as equally frightening and illegal circumstances as the practice itself) to the practice of self-directed gentle rinsing of one's nose and sinuses with warm saline solution?
Google waterboarding....
10Waterboarding is like a neti pot in the same way that being raped is like having sex.
11oh Eli, you must be new...Aunt Coosa is always entertaining us with her, ummm..."interesting"...perspective on the way things should be. i don't think i'd ever want to find myself lost around her way lest i end up with a bullet in my behind!
I always picture her as Granny from The Beverly Hillbillies. Funny and kooky/slightly crazy, but harmless and always entertaining. Just sit back and let her do her thang...
12oh okay nicachica - thanks for the heads up
I was at a loss for words...
13Whenever I think of a netti pot, I think of the Six Feet Under episode where George gives Nate one for his birthday. And they're at the dinner table, and I think Claire is on e and Ruth is going crazy about something. That show was so amazing.
14I usually don't comment as I feel that what I have to say isn't exactly welcome, but here's my question when it comes to "torture": If waterboarding or any other kind of torture would have prevented 9/11, would you have supported it?
15Personally, absolutely not.
To support torture is to condone the calculated mistreatment of others. 9/11 was unspeakably criminal, traumatic, devastating. How is torture any different in its execution? Numbers are irrelevant, as the principle remains the same.
Regardless, the logic upon which that question is based is faulty: it would require torture to be a continuous practice should a society wish to be free of outside harm, as 9/11 is not the sole attack the United States has had.
This is without even delving into the inaccuracies and fallacious 'information' drawn from tortured victims.
If the individual being tortured is deemed a terrorist - that could be questioned depending on proof/semantics. If a super-power embraces torture they are no better, in my opinion. They are simply creating martyrs.
16If you told me that if you tortured somebody then 9/11 wouldn't happen, I'd have you arrested because obviously you were witholding evidence.
17If you simply arrest anyone who looks like they might be bad person, crime would go down, but that doesn't make it right. There are better ways to prevent terrorism.
Or, conversely, if mass use of neti pots would have prevented Dubya from being "re-elected."
18I watched the entire video and I have to say I thought that waterboarding would be a lot more dramatic. If this is all that was done to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, then I am totally dissapointed.
19VF has been pissing me off lately.
20No offense, harmony, but if VF is the only thing that has been pissing you off and keeping you up at night, consider yourself lucky.
21I think we cannot comment on how something looks like "no big deal" if we have not previously experienced it.
Some of the comments on this thread really surprised me. Its so easy to condone something when you feel you are on the right side of the water jug.
Torture is not okay, and it does a disservice to the image of the USA. Then again, neither was us throwing American Japanese citizens into internment camps in the 1940s. Nevertheless we did that too, to people whose only crime was their ethnicity which was assumed to be enough to prompt suspicion of spying. Over half of the residents of these camps were children, and 2/3 of them were American citizens. None of the people in the camps ever showed disloyalty to the nation, and in the end 10 people were convicted of spying for Japan...
All of them caucasian, not Japanese. Unlawfully pulling people from their homes, splitting up their families and holding them as virtual hostages together in the name of "defence" actually did nothing whatsoever to help the war, or prevent it. Nevertheless, the country was happy to defend its choice as "necessary" at the time.
Careful what you approve of, because someday, those things could be used on you with the same justification.
Final note: Torture would have not "prevented 9/11" (lol, tbh, a stunning insight into world politics).
22I don't need to see a video to know that it's torture.
23christopher hitchens is a douche, but an entertaining douche. now i know he's also a stupid douche. i don't need to have someone shoot me in the leg to know it's painful. i think everyone by now has heard enough definitions of water boarding to know that it is indeed torture - without having to go through it. and i'm not even going to respond to people trying to defend it... it's pointless. if you think that the US torturing people is a good or necessary thing for this country, then you have no ability to see past the tip of your nose and will never understand the lasting consequences of this.
24I think it's interesting when people make sweeping judgments about others they don't know and then call those people close minded.
25Wow. Just wow. These aren't random people that have been pulled out of their beds. These are suspected terrorists. These are the same people that think it's ok that Danny Pearl's head was cut off with a dull knife. I know, they're not all terrorists and I'm certainly not condoning torturing every Muslim walking the streets.
So, hypothetically, the US has a suspected terrorist in custody. By using what some would deem torture, an attack that kills 5000 people is stopped in the planning stages. How can anyone argue that the use of torture in that situation was not beneficial.
I'm so sick of the hate toward the USA.
26Trixie, if you're sick of hatred towards the United States, then you might want to rethink waterboarding. It, and other practices we use, create hatred against us around the world. Trust me, as someone who's just spent a good deal of time in Africa and the Middle East.
The thing is, IT'S NOT EFFECTIVE. Here's the thing: someone who actually is in on a plot to blow up Times Square or create another 9/11 is going to be willing to die for it, so you won't get anything from him. Others will make up lies to stop the torture and then we run off chasing rabbits. It's part of why our intelligence structures suck right now. Good military interrogators will tell you that the most effective way to get good intel is to break down the walls between you and the suspect. They're out of their comfort zone, they know they're in your hands, that's when you say "Things are pretty bad for you, you know, and they won't get better in a hurry. But I can make a lot of things happen for you. You need your kids educated? I can make that happen. You need your wife smuggled out of the country. We can do that. We'll play ball if you'll play ball." It takes more skill and finesse and training but it's always proven to be more effective.
And just as important, as a patriotic American: what used to make us different from the rest of the world, what used to make being American something to be proud of, were things like rule of law, habeus corpus, right to trial, recognizing even enemies as humans. That's what made us us and made us different from "them." At the core, this isn't about who "they", the bad guys, are; it's about who we are, and who we choose to be when we are confronted by threats. Because there will always be threats. Who do we choose to be?
27LOL fuzzles...wouldn't that be nice? No there are many other things that piss me off...TRUST ME.
I just don't like the sensationalist bent that VF has had lately. I used to absolutely love this magazine and it's going downhill fast.
28I thought the torture was the horrendous music they were playing over this piece.
This reporter is a douchebag, more than that he needs to be given an academy award
29Rock on shans99! I agree with you 100%.
30For those of you who think this is not torture, you should have your friend stick your head in a toilet until you think you are going to drown and die. When you pass out due to lack of oxygen to your brain, have your friend pull you out, slap your face to revive you and then repeat until you cry and find yourself breaking down emotionally. Then tell me it's not torture.
And if you also think we're only torturing terrorists, we know of at least four cases where innocent people were incarcerated for over three years enduring this sort of treatment. Do you think this is what our founding fathers had in mind when they wrote the constitution?
31Looks like it's you and me Rac....should we wreak some havoc?
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