'Humanity Is The Devil'

Post is here.

Christopher Hitchens agrees to be waterboarded for Vanity Fair. Video (which I can't seem to embed) here. Malcolm Nance, a friend of mine who has been waterboarded as part of his old SERE training and who instructed Naval special forces how to endure it, described its brutality in gruesome detail to Congress last year.

But it's different to see it. In April, the Windy reported on Amnesty International's waterboarding video. An earlier one appeared on Keith Olbermann's show. It's important to see this, again and again and again, to combat what I believe Hitchens used to call "the sin of euphemism." When John Yoo says the "circumstances" determine if waterboarding is torture if it's done to U.S. troops or when Michael Mukasey says waterboarding is "repugnant" but may not be torture or when Mike McConnell says it's torture to him only because of his bad sinuses, that euphemism embeds itself into the American character. Today we learned from the New York Times that one of the places of origin of what George W. Bush euphemistically calls "enhanced interrogation" is Maoist China. What could be more un-American? What could be more anti-American? And what sort of person would apologize for this? . . .

I've seen it done before. I won't watch it.