Mr. Hitchens was not tortured, as justice might suggest, for certain of his writings, or even for bogarting the Ketel One without putting a new bottle into the freezer. Rather, he willingly submitted to waterboarding in order to write about it.
His account is somewhat more colorful than that of my former colleague Dan Levin about the same experience. Dan is somewhat more . . . reserved than Hitchens.
Read it all, as they say. And prepare for the onslaught of ridicule about Hitchens and for the claims that waterboarding is nothing but the sort of frat prank you might experience at the water park.
Last 5 posts by Ken White
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Having come close to drowning on one occasion myself, I can't imagine much that would be more traumatic than being brought to the edge of drowning and back.
If we used mock asphyxiation, say with tape over the nose and mouth instead of mock drowning, torture apologists would compare it to certain sexual practices. If we used mock firing squads, they'd say "Dostoevsky? Sounds like a communist."
And, of course, there's the matter of Hitchens' past questioning of whether torture is effective. The party line on that has always been that in determining whether torture is effective, you should ask people who torture professionally.
Similarly, if you want to know if astrology is effective, you should ask an astrologer.
Torture is without a doubt effective, in this sense: it provokes the subject into saying whatever the torturer wants to hear. If the victim has useful information he'll give it. If not, he'll give up whatever he thinks will make it stop. Soviet revolutionaries, some of the most ruthless and determined people in the world, gave it all up for Yagoda and Beria. John McCain and Jeremiah Denton, without doubt two of the toughest men around, gave it all up for the North Vietnamese.
So, in that sense, torture would certainly be useful, indeed the best means of interrogation, in the "ticking time bomb" scenario. The small problem with that scenario is that it doesn't happen. If the administration had defused ticking time bombs, they'd tell us about it. It would leak.
The large problem with that scenario is, whether you find the bomb or not, you're still no better than the Soviets or the North Vietnamese at the end of the day. A society like that isn't worth defending from bombs, ticking or not.
Instapundit on the same story:
It tells me that Instapundit (and Althouse, who prompted the comment) are asses who are trying to have it both ways, keeping libertarian street cred while sucking up to the statist right.
Nobody, as Solzhenitsyn wrote of, has his children brought into a cell to watch them being murdered in front of his eyes. So it naturally follows that water torture must not be so bad.
If we want to claim the moral high ground we must occupy the moral high ground.
Just claiming that "we're the good guys" is not enough. We actually have to be the good guys.
Good guys like Jack Bauer?