Christopher Hitchens has self waterboarded

[Metatwaddle]

Jonathan Alter? Really? He's a regular commentator on Keith Olbermann's show, and is usually fairly liberal. My Google-fu doesn't show any record that he's apologized for it, either.

Ew.

[Ender]

Ok guys, lets do a brief history of the thread review here:

Thread posted. Lots of views, few replies. One of which is Elfdart's, which is his usual all noise, no signal deal. Still more views, 1 reply. Elfdart bumps it again, trying to stir up more shit. His responses didn't actually add anything of value, they were ad hominems that no one gave a shit about because there was no discussion going on. Point of it was to get attention. Now you are giving it to him, going off about his posts. Which is all he wanted in the first place. You guys are just playing into his hands. Elfdart, get a dog if you want love and attention.

[Elfdart]

For that matter, since both Elfdart and Christopher Hitchens would not mind if the Red Army watered its horses in Hendon,

Care to back that one up?

He supports the war, therefore he supports torture? Yes, obviously his supporting one position you disagree with suggests he embraces them all.

Please do yourself a favor and try a remedial English course. Then read the relevant part of my post. I'll boldface it for you:

Hitchens opposed torture (as well as pre-emptive war and other things) on principle back when he wrote for The Nation. But he made his bed with Dubya, Cheney and the war whores -all of whom support torture. The logical conclusion: Hitchens either supported torture, or was willing to overlook it rather than call out his new friends.

I'll see your links and raise you one about Abu Ghraib, full of special pleading on behalf of the Cheney-Bush Junta and chock full of bullshit:

http://slate.msn.com/id/2118306/

The outrages committed by Pvt. England and her delightful boyfriend were first uncovered by their superiors. And seven of Saddam's amputees—those whose mutilations were filmed and distributed as a warning—have been flown to Houston, Texas—Texas, capital of redneck barbarism!—to be fitted with new prosthetic hands.

Whether some of Saddam's victims got artificial limbs has nothing to do with what the US did at Abu Ghraib. Nice attempt to change the subject. And as the report by General Taguba pointed out, Abu Ghraib was exposed by Specialist Joseph Darby, so unless the military has reversed its system of ranks, Hitchens is spewing bullshit. Why? To minimize the atrocities his heroes committed at Abu Ghraib seems the most likely answer.

The rest of this article was a series of non-sequiturs and red herrings topped with a large helping of tu quoque mixed in with bogus art criticism -all meant to pooh-pooh the rape, beatings and torture at Abu Ghraib.

The biggest pile of horseshit is this one:

But I am not an apologist if I point out that there are no more hangings, random or systematic.

No, just one prisoner the Army admits was murdered and a few rapes. And yes, Hitchens is a special pleader for those who committed the war crimes at Abu Ghraib.

[Vaporous]

Please do yourself a favor and try a remedial English course. Then read the relevant part of my post. I'll boldface it for you:

You're going to show me the part I answered with the links already, aren't you?

Hitchens opposed torture (as well as pre-emptive war and other things) on principle back when he wrote for The Nation. But he made his bed with Dubya, Cheney and the war whores -all of whom support torture. The logical conclusion: Hitchens either supported torture, or was willing to overlook it rather than call out his new friends.

Yep. Thought so.

I'll see your links and raise you one about Abu Ghraib, full of special pleading on behalf of the Cheney-Bush Junta and chock full of bullshit:

Actually, you dishonest little shit, leave the goalposts where they are and reread your own post. Yes, the bolded bit, where I just showed you're demonstrably wrong because he wrote articles opposing torture. His Abu Ghraib apologetic is disgusting, but what the fuck does that have to do with his obvious opposition to the torture at Guantanamo?

[Rye]

Also, from that link:

The superficially clever thing to say today is that Lynddie England represents all of us, or at any rate all her superiors, and that the liberation of Iraq is thereby discredited. One odd effect of this smug view is to find her and her scummy friends—the actual inflicters of pain and humiliation—somehow innocent, while those senior officers who arrested them and put them on trial are somehow guilty. There is something faintly masochistic and indecent about that conclusion.

I guess calling torturers "scummy" isn't condemnation in Elfdart land? It seems to me that article -while I wouldn't have written it- is that Abu Ghraib was still scummy, the torture was still bad, but it's orders of magnitude less than what would be there had Iraq not been invaded and Saddam's reign ended. Using Elfdart's own argument, since he was against the war, he was against abu ghraib being forced to change at all and would prefer it had it remained the same.

[Elfdart]

Also, from that link:

The superficially clever thing to say today is that Lynddie England represents all of us, or at any rate all her superiors, and that the liberation of Iraq is thereby discredited. One odd effect of this smug view is to find her and her scummy friends—the actual inflicters of pain and humiliation—somehow innocent, while those senior officers who arrested them and put them on trial are somehow guilty. There is something faintly masochistic and indecent about that conclusion.

I guess calling torturers "scummy" isn't condemnation in Elfdart land? It seems to me that article -while I wouldn't have written it- is that Abu Ghraib was still scummy, the torture was still bad, but it's orders of magnitude less than what would be there had Iraq not been invaded and Saddam's reign ended. Using Elfdart's own argument, since he was against the war, he was against abu ghraib being forced to change at all and would prefer it had it remained the same.

He's peddling Rumsfeld's bullshit story about how it was just a few bad apples when everything from the orders to "soften up" the prisoners, to the bondage gear, to the "contractors" shows that it wasn't this handful of reservists, it was the official policy of the US government to torture people.

[Rye]

No, he's not. He says that finding the superiors guilty while the subordinates are in some fashion "innocent" is indecent and smug, as is the attempt to discredit the Iraq war itself. Given how shitty Abu Ghraib was under Saddam, this is an improvement, but still everyone involved with such torture should be prosecuted.