I feel a bit churlish criticizing somebody who volunteered to undergo waterboarding and reported that yes, it is torture, considering a) I would never volunteer to be tortured for an article myself and b) Christopher Hitchens’ unrelenting support of the war might make some people receptive to hearing that waterboarding is torture who wouldn’t be receptive to hearing it from, say, me. But then again, it’s not as if Hitchens’ views about religion have gained much currency among his newfound comrades. Nor was it exactly difficult to predict how the denialist right would react to his Vanity Fair report on being tortured.

More to the point — and I suppose I’m glad Phillip Carter said it first — it’s far from obvious that volunteering to submit to torture in order to confirm that it is, in fact, torture, gives one privileged standing to talk about torture, anymore than crashing a plane gives one special standing to be president (to coin a phrase). Either Hitchens knew that waterboarding is torture before Graydon Carter talked him into experiencing it first hand, or he didn’t know. If the former, what was the point of pulling such a stunt? To risk repeating myself, the universe of people who don’t think waterboarding is torture but are still persuadable is vanishingly small, and may well be the null set. Hitchens happens to be in a propitious position to write a very different, and much better and more important piece about torture, than what the waterboarding sampler produced. If the latter — that is, if he was somehow unaware of the enormous preponderance of data from the Spanish Inquisition to the present — he was unqualified to be writing about torture in the first place.

Let’s assume Hitchens knew damn well that waterboarding is torture before he got strapped down on the uneven plank. Then the only new information he gained through his ordeal is how waterboarding feels (torturous, of course). Except that the scale of physical and psychological trauma Hitchens experienced is at best a mere shade of what waterboarding is really like in actual practice. Hence, the question of whether waterboarding is torture is not only unmysterious and at this point uninteresting to people who have bothered to learn about it, but Hitchens’ method adds virtually nothing to our stock of knowledge.

The interesting questions are those of how waterboarding and other torture methods became US policy, who is responsible for their becoming US policy, how grave is the damage the torture regime has done to our legal system and diplomatic standing, and what are the appropriate punishments for those culpable for the torture regime. These are questions Hitchens’ focus on the phenomenal experience of (a greatly diminished form of) waterboarding allows him to avoid. Now, it wasn’t all that long ago that Hitchens published the Trial of Henry Kissinger, which despite its brevity is the only book to give the monster his just deserts, and which for a while raised public consciousness of Kissinger’s monstrosity for the first time in decades. So Hitchens knows how to write about American crimes of state, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. And he knows how to draw attention to them. He has it in him, somewhere, to write the seminal essay on our government’s unconscionable crimes over the last eight years. The VF piece itself manages to squash some ugly euphemisms, e.g.: “The ‘board’ is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered.” But instead of writing that essay, he passed up the opportunity in order to assent to something most people already know, and the rest never will.

Alternatively, if he was genuinely skeptical about whether waterboarding is torture, the text gives evidence of how that could have been. Consider the nature of the credence he gives to arguments that waterboarding isn’t torture, even though he ultimately rejects them:

A man who has been waterboarded may well emerge from the experience a bit shaky, but he is in a mood to surrender the relevant information and is unmarked and undamaged and indeed ready for another bout in quite a short time. When contrasted to actual torture, waterboarding is more like foreplay. No thumbscrew, no pincers, no electrodes, no rack. Can one say this of those who have been captured by the tormentors and murderers of (say) Daniel Pearl? On this analysis, any call to indict the United States for torture is therefore a lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilization and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out, and ultimately to bring it down. I myself do not trust anybody who does not clearly understand this viewpoint. [my emphases]

Now, granted, these lines are supposed to be a summary of other people’s views, but the “lame and diseased moral equivalence” locution and what follows it are pure Hitchens hectors of the left. In other words, the “this analysis” that comes from other sources stops abruptly with the descriptive comparison between waterboarding and other forms of torture. The logical leaps are Hitchens’ own. Now look closely at my second emphasis. “Any call” to prosecute American torture amounts to a claim of moral equivalence between the United States and al Qaeda, he says. Think about how looney an idea that is. It means that an American cannot even be reasonably suspected of commissioning war crimes, let alone guilty, unless he and Osama bin Laden are on a moral par. It means that the whole vast range of degrees of moral culpability in between perfect innocence and bin Laden’s culpability is all an illusion.

And what motivates such nonsense? The fact that waterboarding, “when contrasted to actual torture,” isn’t quite as bad. Never mind for now that, as noted, Hitchens didn’t experience actual waterboarding. There are indeed worse ways to torture people than waterboarding. For example, one could subject a prisoner to what’s called a “Palestinian hanging,” a kind of crucifixion with ersatz supplies that leads to massive organ failure and death in the most excruciating fashion conceivable. That too, has gone on under the aegis of the United States in the Bush era. But to pre-emptively excuse waterboarding from criminal sanction because it is not as bad as that is, to borrow a phrase, a lame and diseased moral relativism, nearly precisely equivalent to the idea that one has to wind up like Emmett Till to truly be a victim of racism. In other words, it’s reasoning one would expect the author of the Trial of Henry Kissinger to impale, not to succour credulously.

It is also the refuge of a scoundrel who wants to avoid serious consideration of the problems with his own side in a dispute. Hitchens did not merely blow a chance to write something important and informative about torture, he has been assiduously blowing that chance for years. Hitchens’ two pieces in May 2004 about Abu Ghraib, when the atrocities were first revealed, trotted out the “just bad apples” defense. The lesson he drew was that such exceptionally awful behavior by a handful of thugs only underscored the supreme righteousness of the cause in which the Abu Ghraib atrocities emerged. A third piece in June very briefly mentioned the culpability of the Pentagon and the White House, but made no significant points about it.

In the years since, of course, we have been on the receiving end of an unrelenting stream of revelations that illustrate in greater and greater detail how widely spread the atrocities are, how unconscionable they are, how extensively they were orchestrated at the highest levels of the executive branch, and how deeply culpable top executive branch officers really are. During that same period, Hitchens has written about Abu Ghraib at least six other times not counting the latest VF piece, and about torture plenty more. Not once he has taken up the thread of the government’s guilt since then, except to make excuses for it. As in this claim that Abu Ghraib isn’t as bad as what Russian soldiers have done in Chechnya, or in this slander of war opponents for paying no attention to any war crimes besides Abu Ghraib, or this timely reminder that Abu Ghraib was actually worse under Saddam, or — I couldn’t make this up if I tried –  this classy suggestion that an artist who compares Abu Ghraib to Guernica is comparing US soldiers to the Wehrmacht.

All of which is to say that it’s sort of irrelevant, in the end, whether Hitchens believes waterboarding is torture, let alone whether he has only believed it since getting to feel it for himself. It would have been a lot more impressive — and good for the country and the world, however marginally — if he had skipped the torture sessions and instead confronted some uncomfortable truths about the extent to which torture, kidnapping, murder, and assorted other war crimes have been intrinsic components of the wars he so fervently supports since they were first launched.

Tags: hitchens