Hitchens Gets Waterboarded to Teach Us a Lesson
I think we can safely say that what little debate we’ve had over waterboarding as part of the rigorous interrogation continuum used by our intelligence professionals over the past few years has not served us well. Few people understand what it is and even fewer care to try to find out. Mostly, waterboarding is used as a tool for a few politicians and pundits to grab a little more political power and as a chance to primp and preen and burnish their credentials either as a tough defender of the nation or a virtuous quasi-saint. Christopher Hitchens, however, decided to find out about it first-hand by subjecting himself to it. The result is an article that I think all of us should read, not just for the recounting of his experience but for the clear way he sets out the arguments for and against using the technique. There is a lesson in his experience and we should take some time to learn it. Two points, I think, are abundantly clear.
1) America has been waterboarding people for a very long time. Until 9/11, all those people were Americans, and we waterboarded them to prepare them at least a little for the torture they would surely receive if they ever fell into the hands of our enemies.
2) There is a very good and reasonable case to be made for waterboarding and against it. We should listen carefully to both arguments because until we understand both of them, we will never be able to reach an informed decision.
I do not agree with Hitchens’ conclusion – that waterboarding is undoubtedly torture – but I do agree that we have barely even begun to have a rational discussion on the matter. Waterboarding is a serious thing and is demands we be serious about it. Our politicians, especially, have not been very serious at all and we’ve not insisted that they treat it so.
But if we are going to decide things to our satisfaction, we’re going to have to sit down and listen to both arguments. We’re going to have to winnow the valid points from the hyperbole and make up our minds. Lots and lots of lives are at stake. I commend Hitchens for doing what he needed to do to decide the matter for himself based on reason and experience and not panic and rumor. I thank him for bringing us the lesson that waterboarding demands we treat is with serious and mature thinking. It, like the rest of life, is not so simple that a knee-jerk opinion solves the problem well.
Other Posts of Interest:
- Are the Democrats Dumb or Malicious?
- Barack Obama Missed a Couple Islamists
- Fred on The SCOTUS Takeover of the War
Category: Cool Columnists and Wicked Writers, The Long War Here At Home
Two points, I think, are abundantly clear.
1) America has been waterboarding people for a very long time. Until 9/11, all those people were Americans, and we waterboarded them to prepare them at least a little for the torture they would surely receive if they ever fell into the hands of our enemies.
BS. All the while, those folks getting 'fake' tortured ALWAYS KNEW they wouldn't get hurt. Uncomfortable, for sure – but they always knew they would go home to their families soon after the experiment.
2) There is a very good and reasonable case to be made for waterboarding and against it. We should listen carefully to both arguments because until we understand both of them, we will never be able to reach an informed decision.
There is absolutely NO VALID REASON to torture another human being. NONE. No good intel comes from it, and you only subject your own soldiers to the possibility when and if they get captured. Taking the high ground is the moral thing to do; it is the Christian thing to do; it is the right thing to do.
No thoughtful American would take a nanosecond to justify torturing any suspect – no matter what Jack Bauer would do. ITS A TV SHOW, IT IS NOT REAL.
Do go back and read the article. Everything you just said Hitchens addressed very elegantly.
The Christian thing to do? Are you saying our nation is a Christian nation? And that we should aspire to Christian ideals?
"Taking the high ground is the moral thing to do; it is the Christian thing to do"
Umm, the Christians pretty much invented waterboarding (the Spanish Inquisition is the first documented usage). I guess it's the high ground in that one must be above another to pour water down their throat. But I wouldn't call that moral.
As for you Jimmie, you must certainly believe that the films McCain starred in in Vietnam were perfectly real. After all, verscharfte vernehmung always produces good intelligence, right? Oh that's right, were not Nazis, so we have to use the English translation: enhanced interrogation. At least the Khmer Rouge were willing to call it torture. They were at least honest about it, if evil. And their interrogation regime was a subset of ours. We do everything they did, but they weren't willing to do some things that we are. That should give us some pause, but it doesn't.
I'm sure you understand that the reason John McCain was tortured wasn't to produce useful information but to produce propaganda films to be used to increase VC and NVA morale and to hack at American morale. At least here, it certainly worked.
Nice touch with the Nazi reference, though. This isn't your average conservative blog, though. I'm undeterred by your inference and you know better than to think that'll fly here. Plenty of things we do during a war other nations, good and bad, also do during war. How and why we do them matters a great deal. Surely you must pause a little to know that such interrogation procedures were eagerly endorsed by Democratic leaders in Congress as well, yes? This is not a partisan game. It is a warfare tactic and like any tactic, it must be judged soberly.
"Surely you must pause a little to know that such interrogation procedures were eagerly endorsed by Democratic leaders in Congress as well, yes?"
No I don't pause about that. I do not hesitate one bit to criticize them. You can ask my Senator, Ken Salazar, about that. I will not vote for him under any circumstance and I've made that abundantly clear to him. As far as I'm concerned, those that endorse these techniques are morally equivalent to Pol Pot. And I've said exactly that to Ken Salazar.
As for it being a warfare tactic, mass suicide is also a warfare tactic. Does that make it right? Or sensible? Torture is, at it's best, counterproductive. Our enemies surely won't want to surrender to us if they know we will torture them. So they will fight to the death against us even if they know it's a losing battle. We have given them little choice. I'd rather be dead than face years of torture. The fact that we would use counterproductive techniques just because we like to make people suffer is truly horrible.
You say it is counterproductive but it clearly is not. We know it is not beacuse we have the word of at least one man who waterboarded one of the three people who weren't Americans to every be waterboarded in this country that says so.
You can make a lot of arguments against waerboarding. What you can't do fairly is assume the definition of torture or claim that waterboarding, at least, does not work. The former is unfair in an honest debate and the latter is simply not true.
And it's pretty egregious to compare waterboarding, which is the worst we've done to any of these recent enemy combatants to what John McCain endured or the routine depredations of the Nazis.
"And it’s pretty egregious to compare waterboarding, which is the worst we’ve done to any of these recent enemy combatants to what John McCain endured"
That is just BS. John McCain endured beatings and stress positions only. That is clearly within our repertoire, and we do it all the time. But we ADD techniques from there. Including waterboarding, which the North Vietnamese considered to be too extreme and counterproductive to use. Only the Khmer heathens would stoop so low in their minds. But I guess we will too.
And it is counterproductive. My father's best friend was a man who was forced to serve in Hitler's army when he was 15 years old. You know what the first thing he did as a soldier was? He surrendered to the Americans. Why? He knew he'd be treated better as a POW by the Americans than he would be treated as a soldier in Germany. But that's not true anymore. One of my best friends was a guard in a POW camp in Iraq during the first Iraq war. They treated them well back then, and Saddam's soldiers were surrendering so quickly that it created a logistical nightmare just to set up tents for them. But nobody's going to do that anymore. They've got nothing to lose, so they might as well keep shooting at us. It's better to be killed by us than captured by us now. There are things worse than death, and when you impose those things on people they become much more dangerous. And you want to put our soldiers in greater danger for some twisted theory or sadistic tendency (not sure which).
So does waterboading work? Well, you can get anyone to say anything with it. So for propaganda purposes, it works quite well. As a means of finding information, it's not very effective. The reason is that you will keep torturing someone until you hear the answer you want to hear. If that isn't the truth, oh well. Most of the people we torture will have no useful information. So any information they give is just fabrication. And they absolutely will give information. And it absolutely will be lies. Trust me, you can get people to lie to you without being evil about it.
You're right fostert….that's why I have been against torture all along. Al Qaeda's weapons are no match against the powerful US war machine; a fact which had to be plainly obvious to Al Qaeda and the Taliban before they ever picked this fight. But picked it they did and now because they know we will torture them, they are refusing to lay down their arms and surrender. It's our own darn fault this thing is dragging on like it is. Because we are acting so immorally towards these gentle Al Qaeda & Taliban freedom fighters who, if they could only be assured that they would be treated fairly & humanely, they would have given up by now.
So I'm going to say some nice things first. Lori, that was a great snark. i really did enjoy reading it. And then there's this: "This isn’t your average conservative blog, though." You're damn right about that. And I thank you for that. You've put up with my snarks and actually engaged me in in real debate for a long time now. You really do deserve credit for that. And I'm certainly grateful.
But there's a real issue here. Terrorism is like any war we've dealt with. And that is exactly why we shouldn't approach as if it were a war. It's not really police work, either. But police work is much closer to what we need than bombing people is. And the police style approach can be amazingly effective.
Very few people have actually faced a real interrogation. I have. And it was no act like Hitchens' stunt. He could walk away. I was facing life in prison for international drug smuggling. And it was for real. This was no experiment. I was innocent, of course, but how can I prove that? Well, telling the truth worked in this case. The reason is simple. They had a very effective method of interrogation that involved no violence whatsoever. But it did get to the truth. But I can assure you, those Customs agents really wanted to bust me. They were extremely disappointed that I wasn't their guy. But what if they could torture me? Well, I would have admitted to exhuming Princess Diana's body and raping it. Give me a crime, and I'll admit to it under torture. And so would you. So the result would have been that I would now be serving life in prison for a crime I didn't commit if I were tortured. So I'm damn glad they didn't torture me.
But if you think the questioning I received was a joke, you'd better think again. People who are trained to question people have to learn an amazing amount of psychology. And they will have you so confused that you don't even have a chance at telling a lie they will believe. I've been there in a foreign country where I have no rights. And trust me, the idea that you will never see your country again is quite disturbing.
But not as disturbing as waterboarding. Look, I've asked Jimmie what he thought would really constitute torture, and he offered up the pulling of fingernails. That's a joke. I have personally lost six finger/toe nails, and it isn't really that painful. In fact, I ripped one out myself to see what it was like. And I've personally put my cigarette out on the back of my hand five times to prove a point to various people. The point was simple: anyone can overcome pain if they have the proper mental focus. But nobody can overcome drowning. That's what's so different about waterboarding. Some people succumb to pain, but it is very easy to learn how to become immune to such influences. But when you can't breathe, there's nothing you can do to overcome that. You create a very simple situation: talk or die. We can all take pain (except for John McCain, obviously), but few of us can accept death. I can accept death, but only in my conscious mind. When the lack of oxygen takes over, I'm no longer conscious and even I will succumb to waterboarding simply through reflex.
If I ever faced torture, I'd start with this: "If you tell me what you want me to say, I'll say it. And hopefully we can avoid the torture." Sadly, that won't work. Torturers want to torture people. They don't do it for information, and they don't even care if they get good propaganda. They are merely criminals who want to make humans suffer.
"Terrorism is like any war we’ve dealt with."
Missed a 'not' there. It should read:
Terrorism is not like any war we’ve dealt with.
That's big difference. Sorry about that.
Tom, thank you for saying those very nice things about me. I do appreciate your being here and I like having you around. You and I may snark at each other, but we're never truly inconsiderate of each other and that's important, I think.
To your quote, though. Your approach has a couple very large flaws in it. We must treat this as a war because that is what it is. We are not dealing with a gang of international crooks trhying to heist our graet works or art or something. The Islamists are deadly serious about trying to kil as many of us as they can. That is war, by any reasonable definition.
The more important reason we have treat our war liks it's a war is because that is the only way we can act quickly and proactively. We can strike Islamists before they strike us. We can break up their meeting places and drive them out of their shilters. That is something that is very, very difficult for us to do if we treat this as a law enforcement matter.
I've worked for a couple different police departments for almost twenty years. I have seen countless examples when we knew that there was some criminal activity happening but could do nothing about it because we had not met the rules of evidence and probable cause. You know as well as I that war and law enforcement are two radeically different things. They have completely different rules and they come "on the scene" at much different points. Police enforce the laws. They do not and can not truly prevent laws from being broken. Law enforcement is a game of reaction. But in war, being fully reactive means that you're losing. In this war, where the battlefield is right here, being reactive means dead innocent Americans. I can't imagine why we would want to take that risk when all we really have to do is fight the war like it's a war.
I know plenty of very good interrogators. Believe me, they get more than their share of lies and evasions. I have seen, more than once, an interrogation stop because a suspect invoked a certain right. That is what would very easily happen with Islamists as well and that would end up killing a lot of us. Yes, it is a real concern.
Your situation is entirely different from that of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, for instance. KSM came here to die. He had no fear of being interrogated like he was on an episode of Hill Street Blues. What fear does prison hold for him. His situation and yours were entirely different. You feared prison. He does not. You were innocent. He is not. You were willing to cooperate. He wanted to murder his interrogators. He had already steeled himself to a fiery fate. What more could we do to him? Well, waterboarding – not even five minutes worth – demonstrated that he was not as steeled to death as he thought and it gave us an important piece of leverage.
You gave up what you knew because you had no power and wanted something very important from those people interrogating you. That is what our interrogation techniques do to those we have in custody. It reminds them that we do indeed have something very important that they want. It reminds them that we do have power over them and that we can exercise that power in very real ways if we so choose. It encourages them to work with us isntead of against us. And it does work. We know it works because we have stopped attacks because of the intelligence they have produced.
LOL – Well come on then….engage! You have to admit that at least that part of what you said was over the top….
Our enemies "won't want to surrender"….period.
They want us to die; they want to see our country brought to it's knees. You have missed the mark in attempting to discern what motivates them.
They know it is a losing battle already…militarily anyway. They are still willing to fight to the death.
The only hope they have is being able to outlast us through this kind of propaganda. They know that America is full of softies that are naive enough to take up their cause. That's why I am pointing out the inherent silliness in this part of your statement.
Water-boarding is over. At the point it became publicly known, our hand was revealed to them & the technique for the most part lost its usefulness. So all the self flagellation that poses as attempts to set our country on the ever elusive “right track” seems quite pointless seeing how little the technique is being used these days, if it is even still being used at all.
So what is the point of these exercises? I have a few theories….
What is gentle about beheading a prisoner with a dull knife. These Taliban and AlQueda operatives torture and kill innocent people. If waterboarding would have exposed the 9/11 attack and prevented the death of one of your family members, would you still be against it?