Jonathan Chait makes a good observation about how the right went from insisting that waterboarding isn’t so bad and was, in any case, only carried out on three bad guys, to attempting to gloss over all manner of torture.
The torture regimen turns out to have been carried out on a vastly broader and more depraved scale than the administration’s defenders, or even its critics, ever imagined. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA torture, released this week, describes practices few conservative politicians or intellectuals had prepared themselves to justify. Men were shackled to walls or ceilings for days, in diapers, locked in coffins, rectally violated, subject to days of sleep deprivation, beaten, and (in one instance) murdered. Several intelligence staffers reported being traumatized by the experience.
Republican Congressman Seems to Have Skipped Some Key Parts of the Torture Report
That is more than one can say for the torture apologists. Having dug in to mount an extended, pointillistic defense of waterboarding, they have found their position suddenly overrun, and have retreated to new ground. “Every civilized nation agrees that torture is wrong,” Senator Ted Cruz complained after the report was released, but, “after six years, enough with saying ‘everything is George W. Bush’s fault.’ ” To Cruz and other Republicans still in office, the allegation that the Bush administration used torture had gone from outrageous smear to tired news without ever having passed through the stage of acceptable topic of discussion.
You might remember when Christopher Hitchens voluntarily subjected himself to waterboarding and declared that it was definitely torture. You probably don’t remember when Christopher Hitchins voluntarily subjected himself to “rectal rehydration” or being slammed into walls and locked in a coffin-sized box, or allowed himself to clothed in a diaper and hung from ceiling-hooks for days on end while sadistic tormenters prevented him from falling asleep. You don’t remember it because it never happened. And it never happened because the right never tried to defend those things, which meant that Hitchins didn’t try (and fail) to prove that they really weren’t more than “a little water on the face.”
If he were alive today, however, these are the kinds of “experiments” Hitchins would have to undertake if he wanted to try to minimize the horror of Sith Cheney’s counterterrorism policies.
