Renowned liberal hawk, chain-smoker, and evangelizing atheist Christopher Hitchens submitted to being waterboarded. His conclusion:
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.Pictures and video accompany the (short) article.
In related news, the U.S. government has been using "enhanced interrogation" methods lifted whole-cloth from a 1957 Air Force report. The problem: the Air Force report was a description of Chinese Communist torture techniques used to elicit (often false) confessions from U.S. prisoners during the Korean War. All of this once again presses upon us a burning question: For how long can we continue to behave like our depraved opponents (past and present) and still expect to be afforded the moral higher ground by the global community?
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