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“If Waterboarding Does Not Constitute Torture, Then There Is No Such Thing as Torture”
Posted by KTK

It’s hard to believe any of the creeps, perverts, and sadists who connived at and then defended torture by the US military and intelligence services under the Bush administration can still maintain their dismissive and amoral charade. Over and over we have heard the reality of waterboarding and other shameful abuses. Over and over we have heard that these torture techniques were adopted from practices used by the most lawless enemies of the US, practices the US had formerly denounced as war crimes and had refused to countenance within our own doctrine. (Just today it was revealed that specific training materials for torture had been lifted wholesale from a Korean-war-era review of Chinese military torture techniques intended to elicit false confessions.) And over and over we have heard how inhumane and unbearable these techniques are, while smug psychopaths like Jay Baybee, John Yoo, and Alberto Gonzales dismissed such complaints and sickeningly passed off torture and abuse as some kind of game or inconvenience.

As if it has to be said again - and apparently it does - Christopher Hitchens volunteered to undergo a mild form of waterboarding and report his experiences in this month’s Vanity Fair.

more…

He concludes:

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

Tellingly, when he contacted an unnamed group of counterterroism veterans to ask for a demonstration, they first refused to even consider it when they learned his age (59), then demanded a medical clearance and legal release. His “interrogation” was pre-arranged and conducted without violence. His “captors” treated him with extreme gentleness and courtesy, calling him “sir” and repeatedly enquiring after his comfort and safety; the actual board he was strapped on was nearly horizontal, unlike in many cases of real torture. A paramedic checked him, and he was ordered to rest between torture sessions (he was able to undergo two, both lasting only seconds). He was given three methods of signalling an end to the torture, and tested repeatedly to be sure he could use them correctly; he was also reassured several times that the torture would end “immediately” the moment he signaled, and questioned to see that he understood this. (For some reason they also played electronic prog-rock in the background, the reason for which never became clear. This apparently is not addressed by the Geneva Convention.)

In short, Hitchens was given the most mild simulation of a so-called “simulated drowning”, under conditions aburdly short of an actual torture session or even the vaunted military SERE anti-torture training that defenders of torture point to as justification. Here is what he says about it:

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. . . .

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. . . .

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.

There is a video here. It is hard to watch. Probably quite a lot of people would smile at the thought of Christopher Hitchens being tortured by agents of the insane and illegal war he cheered into being. It is tempting to view it as ironic justice. But I had tears in my eyes, watching just the first of those two brief sessions he describes. You are witnessing a man bound immovably in a position of utter vulnerability, slowly and deliberately being done to death in one of the most terrifying ways possible by calm technicians of sadism, until inevitably he reaches the point that he simply cannot control his own body or will - and would in fact die if he could manage to maintain such control.

Hitchens, by my watch, lasted 17 seconds before panicking in his first session, and apparently a shorter time in the second one. Both ended with his complete loss of will and self-control; he reported later he actually believed he was shouting the safety code word though in fact he did not, and he remarked also on how grateful he was to one of the torturers for a kind word:

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.

He also states that he is now subject to nightmares and waking terrors, to feelings of being suffocated while sleeping, and to panic attacks anytime he becomes the least bit over-exerted or short of breath. And remember, this was not merely an unrealistically mild torture session, it was something Hitchens himself had asked and agreed to have done, by people he trusted.

Hitchens - who has been pro-war but anti-torture consistently [UPDATE: Not that consistently; he has often equivocated by denying that certain forms of abuse were “torture”, or using euphemisms like “extreme interrogation”.]- does not stop to reflect on the relationship between the two. And while he notes the horrifying psychological destruction that arises when the victim becomes emotionally traumatized to the point of identification with the torturer, he does not seem to notice the ways in which pro-war sentiment has eroded the moral sensibility that once made torture unthinkable in this country (to the point that “they do it to us” is now used as a justification for our doing it ourselves). But he has done a service here - a service of physical and emotional courage - in telling us from the inside what toll this behavior takes, and how much of the fundamental sense of self that defines a person it destroys. The obscenity of this practice is captured as clearly here as anywhere, and it bears repeating that this demonstration was but a fraction of the actual reality documented, and apparently continuing by way of US personnel or under US authority, throughout the world today.

NB: Fox News undertook a similar demonstration a year and a half ago. Their reporter underwent a slightly different form of water torture, apparently conducted by people he knew personally, involving a series of phases” of increasing severity. “Phase 1″ consists of merely having water poured in one’s face; he repeatedly insists that it was only “annoying” and he felt fine - the videotape shows him panicking and struggling after 4 seconds and shouting “Stop!” after 13 seconds. He manages to get through 3 of a planned 5 phases, and as the phases escalate he panicks sooner each time. The reporter estimates that he “probably went about 30 or 40 seconds before I had to [signal to stop]” in Phase 2; in fact, it was about 12 seconds. In the third phase, after 10 seconds he states “This isn’t that bad” and then immediately begins struggling and gives up. (At one point he remarks to the camera “I don’t know how many [phase] numbers these guys got.” One of the torturers says menacingly “We’ve got a lot.”)

Being a Fox News tool, he keeps trying to minimize an experience that was clearly unendurable for him, and he himself says left him frightened and unable to continue. He says several times in one video clip that he recovered quickly from the waterboarding and felt physically OK soon after, in a sense that seems to imply that the practice is acceptable for that reason. But contrary to apologists’ claims that torture is acceptable if it isn’t permanent, or, in John Yoo’s clinically sadistic terms, doesn’t produce “death or organ failure”, the reason torture is wrong, as Hitchens sees clearly, is that it is torture. That is, it is one of the things that must not be done, for virtually any reason, because the thing in itself is so bad that it violates every decent moral norm (or, if you like, outweighs in moral import the value of whatever desperate lies and babblings it might generate).

Hitchens notes that, in just his first 17-second session of waterboarding, he would willingly have given up his family to make it stop. (He references 1984’s “Room 101″, where your torture is “the worst thing in the world”, to explain his own personal fear of drowning. It is worth recalling here the heartbreaking consequence of that torture at the end of the book: “Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia!”) But he also notes that it would be much worse for someone who didn’t know anything or was actually innocent: they would not know what to say to make it stop, and would eventually say anything they thought might help. On one hand, this creates the obvious drawback that torture is worthless as an interrogation technique (everyone talks, and anyone who can’t talk lies, so you are certain to get false information but have no way of identifying it); many critics of the practice have pointed out this practical problem. But the moral problem with torture is more severe: it erases the humanity of the victim, both in the mind of the torturer (they are seen as fit for inhuman treatment) and in the victim’s own mind (they are brought to do what, with their faculties intact, they might otherwise have died to prevent). Torture consists in doing to human beings what no one can have done to them and retain their moral identity; it is a violation of the one thing that must never be lost or broken, to have a moral self at all (and, it goes without saying, it is a forfeiture of that last inseparable value on the part of the torturers themselves). It doesn’t matter that the victim can survive it; what matters is that the victim does not endure while it is happening - it is the sacrifice of humanity itself, even if temporarily.

To be a moral person is to accept that there is something that one must not do - that one is constrained by bounds one cannot evade, in at least some things. Most people - even the very worst of us - never even approach the most absolute limits of moral behavior. It is shocking that we now debate whether it is possible not merely to murder people in the name of our government, but to destroy in them the most basic humanity that morality exists, at all, to protect.

July 2nd, 2008 General, Politics, Culture, Iraq, Terrorism, News & Current Events, Fiasco, Torture | 9 comments