Which is scarier, a photograph of Christopher Hitchens getting a Brazilian bikini wax, or a video of Christopher Hitchens being waterboarded? I'm being facetious, obviously. The waterboarding video is very unsettling. Hitchens withstood only seconds of it before giving the signal that the stress was unbearable. He wrote an essay about it, "Believe Me, It's Torture." Excerpt:
You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it "simulates" the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning--or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The "board" is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and--as you might expect--inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don't want to tell you how little time I lasted.
At the end of the short video, reflecting on the experience, Hitchens says it's so horrible that a man being waterboarded would confess to anything to make it stop. It's bad enough, he says, if someone sold out a loved one to save his own life -- but what if you didn't have the information your torturers were looking for?
This is what our country does now.
George Packer, whose blog entry brought all this to my attention, admires Hitchens for being willing to undergo the waterboarding experience, but has reservations:
The fact that waterboarding is torture forces certain questions on anyone who has supported the war on terror as vehemently as Hitchens and who, in the past, has been far quicker to criticize its critics than its excesses. This is the beginning of an argument with himself--not craven self-denunciation, but a genuine effort to draw out and clarify the hard trade-offs and ideological confusions that the past years have forced on all thinking people. But instead of having this argument, Hitchens places it in the mouths of others: the waterboarders on one side, a specialist in interrogation named Malcolm Nance on the other. In other words, he gets out of the way just when one would want him to interrogate himself.
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there's really no talking to you
I meant that in the nicest possible way, you understand. ;^)
Pax
Joe, you raise very good questions. My reading of Matthew 7 is that Jesus is referring to interpersonal relationships within a civil society firmly established. He is not referring to how a government ought to respond to those who want to destroy the civil society itself, which is the situation in which we find ourselves now.
What I mean by innocent women and children are not merely those in the present, though of course they are human beings with intrinsic dignity for whom we have a special responsibility. What I am referring to are those citizens of the future who are depending on us to make sure that the world is safer than it is now. This is why I am grateful, as a resident of the past's future, for the Allied Forces who defeated the Nazis, and the Crusaders who stopped the Muslim incursion into Europe. In both cases, there were, sadly, many innocents killed. Some were justified and some were not. But war is a messy business in which perfect precision is impossible. But that is what happens if you believe that justice, not the absence of war, is the default position. If we cling too tenaciously to the latter, the absence of war as equivalent to peace, we may nurture in our people a tendency to confuse slavery without conflict as the same as justice. In other words, our model would be Cuba. I don't know about you, but I'd rather die free than live as a slave.
I am afraid that the me-narcissism that currently envelops the West (whether its the masturbatory culture of the self-indulgent or the "personal savior" religiosity of the purpose driven self) will lead most of us to choose comfort and prosperity over discomfort and justice. This is why the jihadists will likely win in the long run, I am sorry to say.
But war is a messy business in which perfect precision is impossible.
Oceans of blood have been spilled precisely upon that specious and self-serving justification.
I cannot wait to hear Jesus repeat those words back to you.
"My reading of Matthew 7 is that Jesus is referring to interpersonal relationships within a civil society firmly established. He is not referring to how a government ought to respond to those who want to destroy the civil society itself, which is the situation in which we find ourselves now."
I see your point there, but how blurred is that line between what governments can/must do and what we individuals can/must do?
The government does have the authority (per Romans 13) to exact justice on wrongdoers, sometimes through things like the death penalty and war. But, is every action of a government entity justified by God-ordained authority or are there Scriptural limits on what governments can do?
Let's say for the sake of discussion that I worked for the government and I was ordered by my superior to lie to a prisoner in order to get information from him. Would I be bound by the Biblical directive to not lie? Or would my actions be exempt because I was acting under the authority of the government?
Let's go a step further. What if I were in the Zimbabwe military and Robert Mugabe ordered me to shoot at activists trying to sway voters for the opposition party? If the civil government considers them wrongdoers, would following Mugabe's orders be justified in God's sight?
If neither of those are right in God's sights, then how would things like torture be acceptable to God?
The problem with torture is not a moral one for me.
The problem with torture is that when people are being tortured they will say anything at all for the torture to stop, and are not likely to be persnickety about whether its, um, true.
Please read a book called 'trent 1475' - all about how Jews, under torture, confessed to ritual murder and even implicated friends and loved ones in it.
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