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.
Also of note, Hitchens lists four reasons why we should not waterboard: it's a torture technique we've prosecuted; if we use it, expect it and other torture techniques to be commonly used against our own people; the information extracted by its use is "junk"; it justification leads to other, worse, torture techniques.
(Which may explain why a number of civilian and military leaders are calling for a ban on torture. Those among the protesters include George Schultz and Richard Armitage.)
This is a pretty significant change of heart for Hitchens, who earlier claimed waterboarding was not torture.
And then there was this report by the New York Times' Scott Shane that revealed the military prepared a class on "coercive management techniques" for prisoners at Guantanamo based on Communist Chinese techniques used on US servicemen in the Korean War to extract filmed "confessions" to wartime atrocities. (And which inspired the Manchurian Candidate.)
The techniques were lifted from a 1957 Air Force study intended to prepare US military members for why they might expect at the hands of our enemies.
So Reagan's alleged heir came to follow the moral strictures of Communist totalitarians. And note: the torture methods were designed to elicit false confessions. We have no assurance that the intelligence conjured up by this brutality is anything more than what Dick Cheney wanted it to be. (That's how he likes his intelligence, of course. Whatever he wants reality to be.)
It's interesting that many Bush-backers don't either see the irony that we've appropriated some of the worst from Communist regimes, or don't care. If it's the latter - and I'm assuming these conservatives were also virulent anti-Communists - it makes one wonder what it was, exactly, about the Communist dictatorships they didn't like?
Bush is once again tearing into Senate Democrats today for indicating they will not support Judge Michael Mukasey's confirmation for Attorney General unless he declares waterboarding illegal.
Mukasey's said reason for holding out, i.e. to protect interrogators, who are simply following orders, from prosecution under international law, I think makes some sense, but the Democrats are right to demand an answer. Senators McCain and Graham have stated that they'll vote to confirm if Mukasey issues a condemnation immediately after taking office, but honestly, given all we've been through, would you trust anybody these guys send us?
Mukasey, who seemed to be sailing along until several days ago, is yet another victim of the administration's illegal and failed policies. He's damned no matter what he says. Bush's assertion that Mukasey "hasn't been briefed" makes no difference. What is there to be briefed on? Either you do it or you don't.
This all goes back to what we learned in kindergarten, folks. Dubya must have been sick that day. Once you betray trust, it's pretty tough to get it back. If Bush really wants Mukasey to be confirmed and if Mukasey really is independent, then the administration will declare an end to waterboarding as an interrogation technique.
But that's not going to happen because apparently international law applies to everybody but us, even though we're the ones who helped write it.
