Chairman of the Freedomboard

Hitchens at least deserves some small credit for acknowledging that the circumstances of his own staged waterboarding were not preceded by, say, being force-fed (which is also torture), blindered, ball-gagged, and/or chained in an excruciating position for eighteen hours in a freezing room while being blasted with Slayer. (Although there is some modest attempts at creating an element of sensory deprivation and disorientation.) Extra points also for attesting to his own status as a "wheezing, paunchy scribbler". Indeed.

One can't help but feel that Hitch might have met his contrived fate with more customary brio if he were being boarded with Johnnie Walker Black instead of mere water. Either way, in spite of his averral of the potency of the method -- to get the person to capitulate, mind you, not necessarily to usefully cooperate -- Hitch still finds himself on the proverbial fence.

It's morally exhausting to hear the thirdhand retellings of the frustrations of the rough men entrusted to guard us while we sleep, as the saying goes. Had the matter been approached with somewhat less opacity, who knows? Hell, you could probably put the matter to an open referendum and have a decent chance of a majority approving any means necessary. Ignorance and fear have never had to walk alone for any meaningful period of time, here or anywhere else.

But they just went ahead and did it, and some are apparently angry that we're not appreciative enough now that we are finally finding out what's been done in our name. Sorry, but some of us feel no obligation to help pave the road to hell. If the incidents are aberrations, then the perpetrators need to be brought to justice; if (as seems far more likely) they are systemic, then the operators of that system need to be excised from their posts, even if the system itself has supposedly been revised since then.

Many Americans seem genuinely besieged and infuriated when their oil and food entitlements go up a tick, while a good chunk of the rest of the planet figures out how to live on less than ten bucks a month in dirt-road military dictatorships. These resentments inform much of their worldview, since they are otherwise largely disengaged from even fundamental aspects of policy that directly affect their lives.

The ease with which people convinced themselves that Jack Bauer techniques girded by purity and righteousness against certain evil are absolutely necessary -- preferable, even -- well, that ease is nothing short of striking. I suppose it helps to convince oneself that it is, again, in the context of a startlingly cheesy potboiler of a teevee show, one in which the person being tortured is never some illiterate shepherd sold to the Americans by a corrupt warlord, or a cab driver yanked off the street for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

We're going to look back at this period in our history with embarrassment, if we can force ourselves to remember long enough. These are techniques for which Germans and Japanese were executed in WW2, techniques which we now discover had been cribbed in part from the Chinese Communists' brutal interrogations of dissidents.

The idea that it's somehow intrinsically different when we do those things is at the root of our moral unraveling. Say my neighbor's house gets robbed by heroin addicts for drug money. Say that after my neighbor replaces all his shit, I decide to rob his house, but with the goal of giving every dime from fencing the stolen property to a children's hospital. I don't have any moral standing over the drug addicts just because my stated intentions for the ill-gotten gain are more ethical. This continuing attempt to render ourselves as exempt from basic morality is already biting us in the ass, and will continue to do so for some time to come.