Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Hitchens and Waterboarding



He tells us about his experiences being tortured. Somehow I have the impression that he used to be in the other camp about waterboarding: seeing it as not any worse than getting off the wagon before this little test? Note that in any case actually being waterboarded in interrogations would have an additional layer of horror because there the torturee is not in control of the process.

Who would have thought eight years ago that I would today write about the U.S. government applying medieval forms of torture and that there is an actual debate about whether they are torture or not?

How many ways did Osama bin Laden win? You might want to count them, starting with turning a somewhat free and democratic society into something much more closely resembling a police state, continuing with the loss of habeas corpus and the idea of pre-emptive warfare.