Christopher Hitchens — whom I have always perversely gone on liking, even though I often find him grievously mistaken and frequently cruel when defending his wrong views — decided to experience waterboarding first-hand to find out whether it is torture and if so, how long he could endure it.  (Vanity Fair).  His conclusion?  It is.  As Justin Gardner says, good to see he gets it. 

Hitch writes (in Vanity Fair):

You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The “board” is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added.

In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose…..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 pre-arranged 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.  (Vanity Fair)

He tried it again and it was no easier.  He’d have babbled out any information he was asked to give.  He was ashamed.  He still has flashbacks.

….I was hit with a ghastly sense of the sadomasochistic dimension that underlies the relationship between the torturer and the tortured.. 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.(Vanity Fair)

Hitchens conscientiously sets out the argument used by the ‘honorable’ perpetrators of techniques, who dispute drawing a moral equivalence between the use of waterboarding and the dreadful techniques used by our enemies.(Vanity Fair)    I am not going to set out this argument because I consider it spurious. ‘I….do not trust anybody who does not clearly understand this viewpoint,’ he says.(Vanity Fair) 

Well, most people I know who oppose torture understand this argument.  They just do not agree with it.  I find it characteristic of Hitch, as well as those whose views he regularly endorses, to assume that those who oppose certain viewpoints oppose them because of a failure to follow the logic. 

I understand the reasoning; I simply find it fallacious.  The premise appears to be that acts that are evil may be less evil depending on the consequences. I disagree with this.

According to my view, the relative harm caused by one wrong act as compared to another might conceivably constitute a plea in mitigation, but doesn’t provide a means of calibrating the degree of wrongfulness. .  That bad or not very intelligent people see no problem engaging in the extreme form of a wrong and honorable tactic doesn’t mean that the non-extreme form is relatively honorable. 

It’s quite possibly less destructive and less cruel, but it isn’t more honorable or less wrong or slightly less immoral. It’s not a pragmatic stance; it’s based on an assumption that the consequence can’t justify the method; and that it is always wrong to treat a human being as merely the means to an end. It’s a view founded on my Quaker-influenced religious principles. I know that not everyone accepts this.

But the moral argument is not the only basis on which a concerned citizen may oppose any use of torture.

Hitchens presents the pragmatic argument against torture, as derived from the sort of perpetually furious patriot that right-wingers are likely to find credible.  I’ve presented it myself elsewhere, but Hitch more concisely sums it up, and it gets his endorsement against the ‘we use only the least destructive and brutish means of torture currently available’ school of rationalization.. 

So if you missed all the reasons why waterboarding is no good because it isn’t reliable and endangers your fellow Americans on the front lines, here it goes again:

I passed one of the most dramatic evenings of my life listening to
his cold but enraged denunciation of the adoption of waterboarding by the United States. The argument goes like this:

1. Waterboarding is a deliberate torture technique and has been prosecuted as such by our judicial arm when perpetrated by others.

2. If we allow it and justify it, we cannot complain if it is employed in the future by other regimes on captive U.S. citizens. It is
a method of putting American prisoners in harm’s way.

3. It may be a means of extracting information, but it is also a means of extracting junk information…. To put it briefly, even the C.I.A. sources for the Washington Post story on waterboarding conceded that the information they got out of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was “not all of it reliable.” Just put a pencil line under that last phrase, or commit it to memory.

4. It opens a door that cannot be closed. Once you have posed the notorious “ticking bomb” question, and once you assume that you are in the right, what will you not do? Waterboarding not getting results fast enough? The terrorist’s clock still ticking? Well, then, bring on the thumbscrews and the pincers and the electrodes and the rack. (Vanity Fair) 

So there it is.

People were apparently not all that surprised back in April when ABC News revealed that Bush Administration officials were involved every step of the way in authorizing the interrogation techniques used on al-Qaeda. Bush himself conceded that he was aware of his National Security Team’s involvement. The response was the media equivalent of crickets chirping.

In the final paragraph, Hitch wrote:

One used to be told—and surely with truth—that the lethal fanatics of al-Qaeda were schooled to lie, and instructed to claim that they had been tortured and maltreated whether they had been tortured and maltreated or not. Did we notice what a frontier we had crossed when we admitted and even proclaimed that their stories might in fact be true? 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. (Vanity Fair; emphasis added)

What do you know. I never expected it to happen, but for once in a way I find myself in agreement with Christopher Hitchens.

Memeorandum has more discussion.

CROSS-POSTED AT BUCK NAKED POLITICS