We’ve discussed before how incredibly awful the waterboarding torture technique truly is. As Malcolm Nance— former master instructor and chief of training at the U.S. Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE) in San Diego, California — noted: “Waterboarding is not a simulation. Unless you have been strapped down to the board, have endured the agonizing feeling of the water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs, you will not know the meaning of the word.”
This is what came to mind when I watched this chilling video of Christopher Hitchens being waterboarded, after to took up a challenge from the editor of Vanity Fair. Watch the video. It seems so innocuous. Hitchens is tied to a bench, and hooded, his large bulging belly quite evident. The “demonstrators” place objects in his hands, and he is told to drop them if the stress becomes too great. They also give him a code word (“red”) that, if uttered, everything stops. Then it begins. They place a small towel over his face, and take a big plastic jug of water, like the ones we have seen a million times in restaurants and cafeterias. They pour what looks like a small quantity. Stop. Another small amount. And a few more times. Just as I was wondering when the real torture begins, Hitchens starts panicking and drops the objects in his hands. He is untied, and can barely sit up. He is visibly shaken, completely freaked out.
In an interview, Hitchens confirms Nance: what he went through was no simulation, he was being drowned slowly. He noted a “smothering feeling as well a drowning feeling”. All he wanted to do was make it stop, he could think of nothing else. He actually thought he had uttered the code word when he had not. And now, he admits to panic attacks and nightmares of being smothered, something he was never afflicted with before. Truly chilling.
In another revelation, the New York Times is reporting today that Bush administration’s menu of torture techniques was lifted verbatum from a 1957 study of Chinese Communist techniques used to extract confessions from American prisoners during the Korean War. Even worse, the point of these techniques was to solicit false confessions. In perhaps the understatement of the year, the article notes that “officials who drew on the SERE program appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners.”
Back then, these techniques were considered torture, undertaken by an odious regime. But now, they are merely “enhanced interrogation techniques” and are important tools of national security. Moral relativism in action.
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