Christopher Hitchens has self waterboarded

[Ender]

video at the link

Believe Me, It’s Torture
What more can be added to the debate over U.S. interrogation methods, and whether waterboarding is torture? Try firsthand experience. The author undergoes the controversial drowning technique, at the hands of men who once trained American soldiers to resist—not inflict—it.
by Christopher Hitchens August 2008

Here is the most chilling way I can find of stating the matter. Until recently, “waterboarding” was something that Americans did to other Americans. It was inflicted, and endured, by those members of the Special Forces who underwent the advanced form of training known as sere (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape). In these harsh exercises, brave men and women were introduced to the sorts of barbarism that they might expect to meet at the hands of a lawless foe who disregarded the Geneva Conventions. But it was something that Americans were being trained to resist, not to inflict.


Exploring this narrow but deep distinction, on a gorgeous day last May I found myself deep in the hill country of western North Carolina, preparing to be surprised by a team of extremely hardened veterans who had confronted their country’s enemies in highly arduous terrain all over the world. They knew about everything from unarmed combat to enhanced interrogation and, in exchange for anonymity, were going to show me as nearly as possible what real waterboarding might be like.


It goes without saying that I knew I could stop the process at any time, and that when it was all over I would be released into happy daylight rather than returned to a darkened cell. But it’s been well said that cowards die many times before their deaths, and it was difficult for me to completely forget the clause in the contract of indemnification that I had signed. This document (written by one who knew) stated revealingly:


“Water boarding” is a potentially dangerous activity in which the participant can receive serious and permanent (physical, emotional and psychological) injuries and even death, including injuries and death due to the respiratory and neurological systems of the body.


As the agreement went on to say, there would be safeguards provided “during the ‘water boarding’ process, however, these measures may fail and even if they work properly they may not prevent Hitchens from experiencing serious injury or death.”


On the night before the encounter I got to sleep with what I thought was creditable ease, but woke early and knew at once that I wasn’t going back to any sort of doze or snooze. The first specialist I had approached with the scheme had asked my age on the telephone and when told what it was (I am 59) had laughed out loud and told me to forget it. Waterboarding is for Green Berets in training, or wiry young jihadists whose teeth can bite through the gristle of an old goat. It’s not for wheezing, paunchy scribblers. For my current “handlers” I had had to produce a doctor’s certificate assuring them that I did not have asthma, but I wondered whether I should tell them about the 15,000 cigarettes I had inhaled every year for the last several decades. I was feeling apprehensive, in other words, and beginning to wish I hadn’t given myself so long to think about it.


I have to be opaque about exactly where I was later that day, but there came a moment when, sitting on a porch outside a remote house at the end of a winding country road, I was very gently yet firmly grabbed from behind, pulled to my feet, pinioned by my wrists (which were then cuffed to a belt), and cut off from the sunlight by having a black hood pulled over my face. I was then turned around a few times, I presume to assist in disorienting me, and led over some crunchy gravel into a darkened room. Well, mainly darkened: there were some oddly spaced bright lights that came as pinpoints through my hood. And some weird music assaulted my ears. (I’m no judge of these things, but I wouldn’t have expected former Special Forces types to be so fond of New Age techno-disco.) The outside world seemed very suddenly very distant indeed.


Arms already lost to me, I wasn’t able to flail as I was pushed onto a sloping board and positioned with my head lower than my heart. (That’s the main point: the angle can be slight or steep.) Then my legs were lashed together so that the board and I were one single and trussed unit. Not to bore you with my phobias, but if I don’t have at least two pillows I wake up with acid reflux and mild sleep apnea, so even a merely supine position makes me uneasy. And, to tell you something I had been keeping from myself as well as from my new experimental friends, I do have a fear of drowning that comes from a bad childhood moment on the Isle of Wight, when I got out of my depth. As a boy reading the climactic torture scene of 1984, where what is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world, I realize that somewhere in my version of that hideous chamber comes the moment when the wave washes over me. Not that that makes me special: I don’t know anyone who likes the idea of drowning. As mammals we may have originated in the ocean, but water has many ways of reminding us that when we are in it we are out of our element. In brief, when it comes to breathing, give me good old air every time.


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. 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 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.


This is because I had read that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, invariably referred to as the “mastermind” of the atrocities of September 11, 2001, had impressed his interrogators by holding out for upwards of two minutes before cracking. (By the way, this story is not confirmed. My North Carolina friends jeered at it. “Hell,” said one, “from what I heard they only washed his damn face before he babbled.”) But, hell, I thought in my turn, no Hitchens is going to do worse than that. Well, O.K., I admit I didn’t outdo him. And so then I said, with slightly more bravado than was justified, that I’d like to try it one more time. There was a paramedic present who checked my racing pulse and warned me about adrenaline rush. An interval was ordered, and then I felt the mask come down again. Steeling myself to remember what it had been like last time, and to learn from the previous panic attack, I fought down the first, and some of the second, wave of nausea and terror but soon found that I was an abject prisoner of my gag reflex. The interrogators would hardly have had time to ask me any questions, and I knew that I would quite readily have agreed to supply any answer. I still feel ashamed when I think about it. Also, in case it’s of interest, I have since woken up trying to push the bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and claustrophobia. No doubt this will pass. As if detecting my misery and shame, one of my interrogators comfortingly said, “Any time is a long time when you’re breathing water.” I could have hugged him for saying so, and just then 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.


I am somewhat proud of my ability to “keep my head,” as the saying goes, and to maintain presence of mind under trying circumstances. I was completely convinced that, when the water pressure had become intolerable, I had firmly uttered the pre-determined code word that would cause it to cease. But my interrogator told me that, rather to his surprise, I had not spoken a word. I had activated the “dead man’s handle” that signaled the onset of unconsciousness. So now I have to wonder about the role of false memory and delusion. What I do recall clearly, though, is a hard finger feeling for my solar plexus as the water was being poured. What was that for? “That’s to find out if you are trying to cheat, and timing your breathing to the doses. If you try that, we can outsmart you. We have all kinds of enhancements.” I was briefly embarrassed that I hadn’t earned or warranted these refinements, but it hit me yet again that this is certainly the language of torture.


Maybe I am being premature in phrasing it thus. Among the veterans there are at least two views on all this, which means in practice that there are two opinions on whether or not “waterboarding” constitutes torture. I have had some extremely serious conversations on the topic, with two groups of highly decent and serious men, and I think that both cases have to be stated at their strongest.


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.


Against it, however, I call as my main witness Mr. Malcolm Nance. Mr. Nance is not what you call a bleeding heart. In fact, speaking of the coronary area, he has said that, in battlefield conditions, he “would personally cut bin Laden’s heart out with a plastic M.R.E. spoon.” He was to the fore on September 11, 2001, dealing with the burning nightmare in the debris of the Pentagon. He has been involved with the sere program since 1997. He speaks Arabic and has been on al-Qaeda’s tail since the early 1990s. His most recent book, The Terrorists of Iraq, is a highly potent analysis both of the jihadist threat in Mesopotamia and of the ways in which we have made its life easier. 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. (Mr. Nance told me that he had heard of someone’s being compelled to confess that he was a hermaphrodite. I later had an awful twinge while wondering if I myself could have been “dunked” this far.) 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.


Masked by these arguments, there lurks another very penetrating point. Nance doubts very much that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed lasted that long under the water treatment (and I am pathetically pleased to hear it). It’s also quite thinkable, if he did, that he was trying to attain martyrdom at our hands. But even if he endured so long, and since the United States has in any case bragged that in fact he did, one of our worst enemies has now become one of the founders of something that will someday disturb your sleep as well as mine. To quote Nance:


Torture advocates hide behind the argument that an open discussion about specific American interrogation techniques will aid the enemy. Yet, convicted Al Qaeda members and innocent captives who were released to their host nations have already debriefed the world through hundreds of interviews, movies and documentaries on exactly what methods they were subjected to and how they endured. Our own missteps have created a cadre of highly experienced lecturers for Al Qaeda’s own virtual sere school for terrorists.


Which returns us to my starting point, about the distinction between training for something and training to resist it. 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.

I'm not sure what the adjective I want to use here is, but seeing the act performed and getting the testimonial from someone about it is worlds away from the abstract of hearing about it on C-SPAN or seeing The Good Shepard

[Anguirus]

That's...just absolutely chilling.

[Admiral Valdemar]

I didn't need him to tell me it's bad. I know it's not pleasant. Having him try it himself and then write about it is good ammunition all the same. I thought of someone maybe doing this when watching an episode in the last season of Prison Break which had such torture. It wasn't something I could condone in the least.

[Elfdart]

I would have thought that reading any description of witch-dunking would make it clear that forcing water down a person's throat was a form of torture. If you can get superstitious old grannies to "confess" to fornicating with the Devil (a mortal sin and death penalty offense rolled into one), which earned them a gruesome death and damnation in the afterlife, it must be pretty ghastly.

Hell, you could just ask someone who almost drowned what it was like and extrapolate from there.

Hitchens probably thought it was torture because he was expecting to be dunked in whiskey. Fuck Hitchens. He's just a war whore with buyer's remorse.

[Maxentius]

You know, I don't even like the motherfucker, but I can respect him for going through with this. Maybe this article will get some of the hawkish type that look up to him as a paragon of virtue to wake the fuck up.

[Elfdart]

"Where's my chaser?"

[Vaporous]

"Where's my chaser?"

Coincidentally, they did it twice.

[Darth Raptor]

He's just a war whore with buyer's remorse.

Better late than never, I guess.

[Flagg]

Hitchens probably thought it was torture because he was expecting to be dunked in whiskey. Fuck Hitchens. He's just a war whore with buyer's remorse.

Pretty much. My thoughts were something along the lines of "Why did they stop?" Is he whoring himself out for McCain now under the guise of stopping the evil Islamists?

[bobalot]

Torture is torture, it's not "aggressive interrogation" as some people have put it. Since when did we become total douchebags and stopped calling a spade a spade?

As far as I'm concerned, people who believe that state sanctioned torture is okay should live in the uniformly shithole countries that already practice it.

[Pelranius]

Now when have Alan Dersowhitz and Scalia set their appointments for?

[The Spartan]

Torture is torture, it's not "aggressive interrogation" as some people have put it. Since when did we become total douchebags and stopped calling a spade a spade?

When the Bogeyman frightened us and we started jumping at every shadow and creak while we desperately hide under our sheets.

[Kanastrous]

Can we have Hitchens stripped and stacked in a naked dogpile with Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly, while women point at their tiny genitals and laugh?

Since he's apparently exploring this sort of thing, now.

[Rye]

How atrocious for a journalist I disagree with on a few things to try and report on something like torture by subjecting himself to it in order to speak out against the US government with some experiential authority. What a cunt! Who does he think he is? Someone I agree with?

[Admiral Valdemar]

How atrocious for a journalist I disagree with on a few things to try and report on something like torture by subjecting himself to it in order to speak out against the US government with some experiential authority. What a cunt! Who does he think he is? Someone I agree with?

I know. It's hilarious watching the people in this thread like Elfy get bent out of shape because someone they otherwise don't like did something they'd never have the balls to do.

Yeah, I see loads of neo-con hawks subjecting themselves to this in order to show up their previous mindsets as being wrong, and then alter their views accordingly.

Oh, wait...

[Uraniun235]

As far as I'm concerned, people who believe that state sanctioned torture is okay should live in the uniformly shithole countries that already practice it.

But they already do...?

[Elfdart]

How atrocious for a journalist I disagree with on a few things to try and report on something like torture by subjecting himself to it in order to speak out against the US government with some experiential authority. What a cunt! Who does he think he is? Someone I agree with?

I know. It's hilarious watching the people in this thread like Elfy get bent out of shape because someone they otherwise don't like did something they'd never have the balls to do.

Yeah, I see loads of neo-con hawks subjecting themselves to this in order to show up their previous mindsets as being wrong, and then alter their views accordingly.

Oh, wait...

Oh bite my ass. I don't have to smear my face with dogshit to know it smells bad. This has nothing to do with courage; it's self-flagellation. Hitchens knew already that water torture was torture. He wrote at length more than 20 years ago about the kind of torture inflicted in what he called "mini-reichs" against the likes of Jacobo Timerman in Argentina. Maybe he'd prefer not to remember when he used to oppose torture as a matter of principle -before he threw in with the neocons and other torture enthusiasts.

I also don't have to stand in front of a firing squad to know that getting shot must really be unpleasant. And I certainly wouldn't throw my arm out of joint patting myself of the back if I waited six years and arranged a publicity stunt where I knew the firing squad had blanks in their rifles. And I sure as fuck wouldn't try to pass off this publicity stunt as some sort of EUREKA! moment, pretending I had only just discovered that being put against the wall to be shot sucks.

So fuck you. Fuck both of you.

[Rye]

How about you explain this first:

Maybe he'd prefer not to remember when he used to oppose torture as a matter of principle -before he threw in with the neocons and other torture enthusiasts.

When did he start supporting torture after "throwing in with the neocons"? I don't recall him being apologetic about Orwell's criticism of torture in Why Orwell Matters, for instance, which would've been the prime time for him to do so. Did you just make this up because you're an idiot tribalist or what?

[Admiral Valdemar]

So fuck you. Fuck both of you.

So that'd be a "yes" to the bandwagon jumping then?

Thanks, all I needed.

[Elfdart]

How about you explain this first:

Maybe he'd prefer not to remember when he used to oppose torture as a matter of principle -before he threw in with the neocons and other torture enthusiasts.

When did he start supporting torture after "throwing in with the neocons"? I don't recall him being apologetic about Orwell's criticism of torture in Why Orwell Matters, for instance, which would've been the prime time for him to do so. Did you just make this up because you're an idiot tribalist or what?

Nice attempt at twisting my words. 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. It's been well known for years that the Crawford Caligula has been a torture enthusiast . But you'll notice that Hitchens couldn't be bothered to pull a stunt like this when Dubya and his war were more popular. So why do it now? Jackal-like opportunism is the only explanation that fits.

[Alyrium Denryle]

How about you explain this first:

Maybe he'd prefer not to remember when he used to oppose torture as a matter of principle -before he threw in with the neocons and other torture enthusiasts.

When did he start supporting torture after "throwing in with the neocons"? I don't recall him being apologetic about Orwell's criticism of torture in Why Orwell Matters, for instance, which would've been the prime time for him to do so. Did you just make this up because you're an idiot tribalist or what?

Nice attempt at twisting my words. 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. It's been well known for years that the Crawford Caligula has been a torture enthusiast . But you'll notice that Hitchens couldn't be bothered to pull a stunt like this when Dubya and his war were more popular. So why do it now? Jackal-like opportunism is the only explanation that fits.

No. Idiot. He did not tie himself to them. He merely agreed(agrees) with them on certain policy decisions, that does not mean, you fucking moron, that he has thrown in every political viewpoint he has with them. Otherwise he would also be part and parcel of the religious right, etc etc etc. Your logic train needs to be put back on its rails.

[Tsyroc]

I remember seeing a thing on tv years ago, back when the controversy over the US torturing people first came up, where a guy had himself water boarded. The results weren't pleasant looking and that was back in Bush's first term. This was on one of the prime time US news shows. Something like 20/20, Dateline, 60 Minutes, or maybe Frontline.

I'm not sure what Hitchens is trying to prove at this point that hasn't already been proven years ago if people were willing to listen. Water boarding is definitely torture.


He seems to be doing kind of extreme stuff. I saw a clip of Bill Maher's show where Hitchens talked about how he'd visited Pyongyang, North Korea through various back channels where he could have ended up in a lot of trouble, or just disappeared in North Korea somewhere. It was interesting getting a first hand account of how shitty things are in North Korea but I didn't think he was that sort of journalist.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

For that matter, since both Elfdart and Christopher Hitchens would not mind if the Red Army watered its horses in Hendon, we can safely say that if Christopher Hitchens must be a neocon, so is Elfdart, by this logic. Oh wait, because neoconservative revolutionary trotskyite is just such a reasonable combination!

[Vaporous]

Nice attempt at twisting my words. 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. It's been well known for years that the Crawford Caligula has been a torture enthusiast . But you'll notice that Hitchens couldn't be bothered to pull a stunt like this when Dubya and his war were more popular. So why do it now? Jackal-like opportunism is the only explanation that fits.

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

As an aside, he has attacked torture previously, invalidating the "Why did he wait?" argument.

Although I have been saying in this space how much I have admired the fortitude and the general bearing of American society throughout the crisis, there is one recent development that has utterly appalled and nauseated me.

In a recent issue of Newsweek, a columnist named Jonathan Alter published a call to consider inflicting torture on the al-Qaida suspects now in detention.

That was 2001

Yes, but what about the ticking bomb? Listen: There's always going to be a ticking bomb somewhere. Some of these will go off, and it's just as likely to be in my part of Washington, D.C., as anywhere else. But we shall be fighting a war against jihad for decades to come. And the jihadists will continue to make big mistakes based on their mad theory. And they are not superhuman: They can be infiltrated, bribed, and turned. You don't have to tell them what time of day it is, or where they are, or when the next meal will be served. (Though it must be served.) But you must not bring in that pig or that electrode. That way lies madness and corruption and the extraction of junk confessions. So even if law and principle didn't enter into the question, we sure as hell know what doesn't work. The cranky Puritan voice of Sir Edmund Compton comes back to me down the corridor of the years: If it gives anyone pleasure, then you are doing it wrong and doing wrong into the bargain.

That was 2004.

[Rye]

How about you explain this first:

Maybe he'd prefer not to remember when he used to oppose torture as a matter of principle -before he threw in with the neocons and other torture enthusiasts.

When did he start supporting torture after "throwing in with the neocons"? I don't recall him being apologetic about Orwell's criticism of torture in Why Orwell Matters, for instance, which would've been the prime time for him to do so. Did you just make this up because you're an idiot tribalist or what?

Nice attempt at twisting my words.

So you're not saying he ever supported torture, though it really looked like you did.

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.

So the guilt by association fallacy are the words you'll be eating today, sir.