I’ve got a little list of people who need the experience myself. Perhaps next time you play L.A. we could compare our lists over a glass or two.

Hitchens was on to something but the puma is getting stronger.

The only way that someone can read about the history and practice of the “water cure” and still maintain that it is not torture, as Hitchens did for several years, is if that person is completely lacking in empathy, and mental-health professionals have some unpleasant words for that condition.

It’s said that knowledge is learning from your own experience, and wisdom is learning from the experience of others; Hitchens is a wise guy, not a wise man. Until he apologizes for his previous condemnation and calumny toward those who figured out that we were waterboarding prisoners and that waterboarding really is torture, I won’t be joining in your praise of him.

Retired, you ask an interesting question. This is an excerpt from Atlantic a few issues back from an article entitled ‘Double Blind’ – I thought this might be of interest. It’s about two British double agents who had penetrated the IRA.

This came clear to Kevin Fulton on the day his cover as an IRA man collapsed. It happened inside an IRA safe house in north Belfast, in 1994. Fulton sat facing a wall, blindfolded. Curtains shut out the pale light of winter. Bottles lay scattered on the floor, and the place stank of stale beer. An interrogator paced the room, his boots scuffing against the floor. He said, “I know what yer done, boyo.”

He pressed a thick index finger against Fulton’s temple, hard, then leaned in close to Fulton’s ear and murmured a series of threats: The IRA hunts down all snitches and executes them. Two quick bullets in the brain. Remember the boy from County Armagh who left behind the pregnant wife. Remember the boy from County Louth who left seven children mewling for a father. Remember them all.

British authorities had recently picked up Fulton for questioning. Now the IRA, which had begun to suspect him of being a British agent, wanted to know why.

Again, the finger to the temple.

“What did you tell them?”

Fulton knew the voice, and its owner: Scap, one of the IRA’s most feared interrogators. Fulton had once helped prepare safe houses for such interrogations, and knew that sometimes Scap’s subjects survived. Sometimes not.

Colleagues called both men “hard bastards”—true IRA boys, mothered by terrorism. They killed for the cause, time and again. But British spies had infiltrated the IRA, spreading deceit and rumors of deceit. The IRA had turned against itself. Scap couldn’t say for sure who fought on his side.

The interrogation dragged on for hours. Fulton remained outwardly calm, and denied everything. Inwardly, though, he felt sick. He’d been spying on the IRA for a decade and a half, and he knew that if Scap broke him—if he admitted anything—he’d be a dead man—own a hole,” in IRA slang.

So throughout the interrogation, Fulton sat stone-faced, blindfolded, and facing the wall. Double blind. He held tight to his secret: yes, he was a British spy.

But then, so was his interrogator.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200604/ira-spy

Comment by Bobby Seale | 2008-07-03 15:07:39

Exactly, terrorism should be fought with appropriate tools.

I agree, we should treat terrorism as nothing more than the criminal offense it is and issue warrants posthumously upon a proper showing of probable cause for the arrest of every perpetrator of a suicide attack.

I’m not sure if this was supposed to be irony but you will not stop a suicide bomber by torturing a probably unrelated person.

She is frustrated because it took….YOU half the day….to realize that everyone here knows that torture is wrong.

You are so caught up in your version of the people here, you can’t even read people’s posts the way they intended.

Comment by Delta1 | 2008-07-03 14:39:55

Hitchens knew too he was getting out, so this by your very words is a simulation. He knew he was not going to die. True torture can not be simulated.

I agree, which is why it is wrong to compare it to a theme park ride or to say the Fox News demonstration is “balanced”. The only way he could see how bad it was would be for him to have been unexpectedly fake kidnapped and then have it tried on him.

The methods of interrogation, including sleep pattern disorder that go on in GITMO are even worse. Waterboarding is just one example of what has been allowed by Cheyney & Rumsfield.

Now he is entitled to a mild, modest swagger as he makes his journey of thousands of tiny, mincing strides across the vaste wasteland of mediocrity.

When we threw the bound, blindfolded prisoners from a helicopter at three foot altitude Back in the Day…was that torture?

Scared the first one shitless, but the SECOND one got very, very chatty almost instantly.

Comment by AdoptedWelshWoman | 2008-07-03 16:14:59

Where in the UK are you from?

I’m from Wales.

Ireland.

The clowns at the levers weren’t even REMF’s, much less leaders or fighters.

Although to be fair, no North Vietnamese MiGs ever got past Seguin while Our Beloved Leader was on Strip Alert in Houston!