4 Comments

1. 

   acilius

    /  April 28, 2009

   “Waterboarding- the symbol of the last administration” Yes exactly. You know those calendars with pictures of all the presidents? In place of Junior Bush they should have a picture of a guy being waterboarded.

   There’s a scene of waterboarding in the movie THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS. What they did to their actor in that movie was actually much worse than what Peter Hitchens’ less interesting brother went through- they tied him to the board, tilted it down so that his nose and mouth were underwater for fifteen seconds, then tilted him back up and did it again. And again. He was bound so that he could not speak or make any move to ask for an end to the torture. Apparently the torturers wanted their victim to talk after they released him, not to interrupt the session.

   Mrs A usually has a very low tolerance for violent images, but she watched that scene all the way through. It was so far out that her brain couldn’t interpret the picture on the screen. “What was that?” she asked me when it was over. That was waterboarding, I said. “That’s what they’ve been doing in Guantanamo Bay.” It was then she recoiled. She gasped and covered her eyes, turning her head from the blank screen. Only when she’d heard it explained could she see what she had seen.

2. 

   cymast

    /  April 28, 2009

   So you’re not a Christopher Hitchens fan . .

   Yeah, I’m not a fan violent images either. And a video of “waterboarding” would be confusing unless you already knew what it was.

3. 

   acilius

    /  April 28, 2009

   I much prefer P. Hitchens to C. Peter is an avatar of the antiwar Right, Christopher of the prowar Left. I’m basically on the Left, so arguments from that quarter rarely surprise me- I usually just nod agreement. When I read something like THE NATION, I often think “This is what I probably would have written if I were in the autor’s position.” And all prowar arguments seem to be more or less the same. So I’m not likely to learn much from a prowar Leftist like C. Hitchens.

   Reading something like CHRONICLES or THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE, I rarely find anything I would have been likely to write. Sometimes I think, “If I were on something I might write like this,” but not often. Usually it’s more exotic than idiotic. And there are an inexhaustible array of reasons to oppose war, so antiwar arguments are likely to be fresh and surprising. So I can learn a lot from an antiwar Rightist like P. Hitchens.

4. 

   acilius

    /  April 29, 2009

   Tom Tomorrow on “What we talk about when we talk about torture.”