Folks, do not misunderstand me. I have nothing but seething contempt for people who advocate "enhanced interrogation techniques" ..... TORTURE is clearly the correct term and it clearly is for the sole purpose of controlling one's own people by striking fear of the State into their hearts. (This is the one thing torture is very good at doing.)

But Hitchens value as a commentator does not lie trying to convince us here who read "Common Dreams". His value lies in trying to penetrate the ear-flaps of those who close them tight and flick the switch of their brain firmly in the 'off' position every time this disaster of an administration is mentioned.

Hitchens is one of their own. One of the 'good ol boys'. Maybe, just maybe, a few more of the thick-necks will pay attention.

If a Hitchens is needed to make this point to that crowd, so be it.

If he then has to use specious and idiotic arguments for the truth to hit home, again, so be it.

At this point I don't care how it is done so much as I care about recovering my rights as a citizen, and if the specious argument is all Hitchens's crowd can fathom, then I am OK with that if it actually works!

Agreed. It does no good to condemn a Bad Guy for doing something good for a change.

"In the application of satyagraha, I discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one's opponent but that he must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy. For what appears to be truth to the one may appear to be error to the other. And patience means self-suffering. So the doctrine came to mean vindication of truth, not by infliction of suffering on the opponent, but on oneself." -- Mohandas Gandhi

physicscitizen: "and if the specious argument is all Hitchens's crowd can fathom, then I am OK with that if it actually works!"
You have already stated that it doesn't work . "This is the one thing torture is very good at." The only thing torture is good
for is the general knowlege that someday it may be you. So better walk softly. For god's sake, don't dissent. If you do,
do it in the privacy of your own home with the windows closed. To do otherwise is to support terrorism. Ari Flescher warned
us, we the people, "be afraid, be very afraid."

We have got to stand up to this crap people. The longer we let it go on, the harder it will be to reverse or stop it.
Come to Denver, aug. 25 - 28. The city has provided a "freespeech zone" where we can all dissent to our heart's
content. It's about 3/4s of a mile from any possible contact with any delegate.

The first amendment doesn't say anything about free speech zones. ""Congress shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;
or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

The corporate constitution says, "just shut the f___ up." Come to Denver and let our democratic hopeful, Barack Obama,
hear that we the people don't need a government that spies on its citizens. This is the definition of fascism and we reject
it in all its many forms. Mr Obama also needs to hear that tacking to the right has been tried before to garner votes.
Al Gore tried it as did John Kerry. Is our memory so short that no one remembers this. Must we keep trying the same thing
over and over again in the hope that this time it will work? This is the measure of pure insanity.

Enough is enough and i'm not going to take it anymore. Come to Denver and put your bodies on the line
as this is the only thing that has ever changed anything.

I give Hitchens credit for being brave enough to submit to this experiment, even if he is otherwise a drink-soaked popinjay, and granting that the experience of a volunteer being handled by "friendly" torturers is not equivalent to a real victim's torture.

So I agree that Hitchens might have persuaded a few like-minded observers to concede that waterboarding is indeed nothing but torture.

But I suspect that the quibble over whether waterboarding constitutes torture is largely limited to the elite political and corporate media class.

The deeper problem isn't that Amerikans are hung up on whether waterboarding constitutes torture, it's that they've come to accept that torture and other military and law enforcement atrocities are justified in fighting the mythical Global War on Terror.

Teevee hits like "24" are the latest in a long line of popular culture espionage thrillers that let the victims fall where they may, and showcase the protagonist-- who is essentially noble and moral, but struggles heroically over the necessity of getting his hands bloody in service of a Greater Good. Your average non-intellectual Amerikan target demographic naturally identifies with the hero.

Thus, the popular opinion that yes, torture certainly seems horrible, and it shouldn't be necessary in a "perfect world". But unless we want to fight those Islamofascists over HERE, we can't put up too much of a stink when our guys and gals Do What They Have to Do to keep Amerika safe, secure, and free.

Hitchens' demonstration isn't likely to impact on this larger and more perilous question.

Hitchens' experience simply removes one of many talking imperial fig-leaves. Maybe it will put some brains behind his vicious tongue and tiny simple mind---a mind fed up with trying to face the world in its complexity and that, like all fascist dupes, pretends its own simple fairy tales are real. Does he need to be shot, raped or killed to know that that sucks too?

I am so weary of this "what is torture?" debate. This could have been over before it started had only a simple litmus test been applied every time some fool tries to say a practice isn't torture. All one has to do when confronted by someone about whether a practice is torture or not is to ask them if they would consider it torture if they heard it was being practiced on American soldiers. Debate over. I doubt even the most idiot blow hard would say a U.S. soldier wasn't being tortured when he was being waterboarded by Al Qaeda.

And the Guilliani defense, "it depends on who does it" doesn't fly very far with most people so I doubt it would have gotten very far.

Hitchens did not fully experience water torture. He had the option at all times to stop it. That makes it a much different experience, since he knew he would survive and could stop at any time.

Hitchens has conclusively proven that Hitchens is an idiot.

why bring a noun, a verb and 9/11 into this, jehosepha?

I agree with physicscitizen. When you are successful, for whatever reason, in partially changing the partial mind of somebody with whom you are accustomed to disagree, that is cause for a small celebration. Throw Hitchins a bone.

Thanks Voxclamantis.

I laughed so hard my a** was reportedly to have just flown over the skies of Thailand a moment ago.

It's good to find that one person has the integrity to admit the fact, but then it's quiet sad that they have to go through such lengths just to recognize it as a fact and we are wasting so much attention on this little kindle when everything else is on fire!

the answer to your question is "No."

So Christopher Hitchens has declared waterboarding to be torture after subjecting himself to a brief experience with that torture method. He has one more experiment to go: he needs to go and resettle in some developing country. And he then has to call on the Bush administration to invade that country–I mean, "liberate" it–and bomb it to smitherine. He then has to welcome the invading/occupying troops with "sweets and flowers." Only then would the Hitchens experiment be complete. — http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2008/07/so-christopher-hitchens-has-declared.html

is it torture, is it not torture, the point is that when you try to "break" someone to try to get information, the "information" you might get out of him might just be something he thinks the interrogator wants in order to make the ordeal stop. Even if it means making it up.

Here's the torture Hitchens needs to experience. Hitchens returns home from a long day at the office, but his house is gone, a smoking burned-out wreck from an American bomb gone astray. He wife is dead. His daughter has had her leg torn off. His son is missing. Hitchens gets a phone call from his aunt in Fallajuh. His uncle has been shot by a sniper. He can't lose the image of his kid sister burned to death by the white phosphorous the US poured down on that doomed city. This are the crimes that Hitchens and his ilk need to feel. THIS is the torture Hitchens has helped these war criminals commit. Hitchens should be hung with the lot of them.

I just love Haroon Siddiqui.......

voxclamantis July 6th, 2008 7:25 pm

Absolutely correct!

PissantNobody July 7th, 2008 1:59 am

I've gotten this far on your suggestion....how do you convince one person to work twice as hard as another person to provide equal benefits for the two of them?

..................................................
Most people in the United States know waterboarding is torture anyway.
And who makes the manufacturing decisions. I ran across this illustration of the problem with socialist economies. Real order...1000 pairs of men's underware, 1000 pairs of womens underware to be delivered, etc. How do you stop mistakes like that?

"Torture is a Moral Issue" reads, or rather used to read, a large black and white banner posted on a busy avenue in front of my church (Episcopal)located next door to the National Cathedral in Washington DC. In the month and a half that the banner has been displayed it has been stolen twice. It is unclear whether the perpetrators took the banner because they agreed with it or because they found it "unpatriotic." There is a clue however for any would be Sherlock Holmes to consider. A prominent advocate of the use of torture lives only three blocks away, at least when he is not at "an undisclosed location." His name is of course Dick Cheney. Elementary my dear Dr. Watson!

Perhaps Mr. Hitchens would be willing to contribute to the third banner we will be purchasing. While Mr. hitchens has written eloquently --the only way he knows how to write-- regarding his personal atheism he may have come to realize that there are not atheists in fox holes or on water boards.

simo, Great, great post! In a perfect world, all the apologists and supporters of the invasion would be subjected to exactly that scenario!

I actually am glad Hitchens has admitted that waterboarding is torture, but it's a very, very small concession on his part. What he really needs to understand is that war is always a torturous enterprise, and attacking the wrong country for the wrong reasons constitutes criminal activity.

As a "militant" agnostic with the attitude that "I don't know and you don't either," I am appalled at some of Hitchen's attitudes toward religion. I've read Sam Harris's books, also, and the across-the-board opposition toward all things Islamic is irrational and ugly.

Although I agree that a great deal of ugliness is done in the name of religion, I believe that religious excuses for war, bigotry, and other evils are simply covers for greed, power, and imperialism. Hitchens's support for the invasion and occupation of Iraq seems based at least partly on his distaste for Islam, and I find that to be highly offensive, no matter his admission that waterboarding is, in fact, torture.

Gde is right.

Hitchens didn't even get the real thing. He had two rods and an escape word "red."

He had the comfort of knowing he had multiple means to stop the process at any point, yet still he could not endure more than a few seconds.

I'd like to see Cheney on the board next.

Then, Rice, Powell, Rumsfeld, Addington, Yoo, Libby, Rove, Bush, Ashcroft, Gonzalez and anyone else who was in on the executive meetings that led to its use and the legal tactics to authorize it.

PissantNobody July 7th, 2008 1:59 am

Sorry, this should have been posted this way.

I've gotten this far on your suggestion….how do you convince one person to work twice as hard as another person to provide equal benefits for the two of them?

And who makes the manufacturing decisions. I ran across this illustration of the problem with socialist economies. Real order…1000 pairs of men's underware, 1000 pairs of womens underware to be delivered, etc. How do you stop mistakes like that?

mirf59 July 7th, 2008 12:10 pm

Be my guest, you may start waterboarding Cheney at your pleasure.

"I've gotten this far on your suggestion….how do you convince one person to work twice as hard as another person to provide equal benefits for the two of them?"

Well ...you gotta first check to see if the first person has had the privilege of inheritence (simple test) , secondly test for color of his skin (as in black or white) as it makes a huge difference, thirdly look for clues in their socio-economic conditions based on the first two tests ... based on how far you get re-run those suggestions.

Well, Haroon-- on CD we often lament people who just talk and talk and never do anything.

While Hitchens taking action by putting in own body on the line may not have been in the same league as Gandhi's fasts for peace, it does accomplish two things:

1. It brings readers one degree of separation closer to waterboarding so, perhaps, more will understand the cruelty of the practice, and

2. It also implies a new standard wherein readers will doubt journalists who don't think waterboarding is torture unless they've tried it themselves. The White House Press Corps might not start bringing canteens and towels to press conferences for follow-up questioning, but this story will, I think, be in the back of peoples' minds whenever they hear someone minimizing waterboarding as "enhanced interrogation"

Both of these are good things. I salute Hitchens' dedication.

Hitchens deserves some praise for his bravery in taking this on. In doing so, he puts himself in sharp contrast to the chickenhawks that are all mouth, all hat and no cattle.

I think the experience clearly transformed Hitchens, though he does not realize it yet.

Any reminder of humanity for those that have been apologists for dehumanizing institutions, such as war for acquisition, is beneficial.

It would be nice if Hitchens now went on a road show and publicly challenged all the advocates of waterboarding to give it a go.

Say what you will about the English -- they have some serious pluck.

In the grand scheme of things, this is a daily blip unless Hitchens challenges his peers with it.

"1. It brings readers one degree of separation closer to waterboarding so, perhaps, more will understand the cruelty of the practice, and"

If 'readers' haven't already figured out waterboarding is torture then the same readers probably dont know who the president is, so it doesn't really matter. However, the 'readers' you are referring to are Hitchens' own kind and trust me, these 'readers' KNOW that waterboarding is torture ... all they are trying to do is maneuver legally.

Hitchens pulled of a stunt to make himself somehow more relevant (which he is not). We have to suffer the endless and ridiculous analysis of this assholes antics.

lol...doesn't common sense reign anymore? flood a person's face with water to the point they nearly die, or die and are brought back just to have it happen again - why in hell has there ever been a question, unless the query came from a moron?

jesus h christ

get the eff off the issue and just recognize what anyone else's mind would tell them...you really don't have to have more than a double digit IQ to understand it all.