Christopher Hitchens, on assignment from Vanity Fair, arranged to be tortured by waterboarding and write a first-person account. He lasted for 17 seconds during the exercise.
From Vanity Fair (video follows below here), Hitchens writes:
Here is the most chilling way I can find of stating the matter. Until recently, 'waterboarding' was something that Americans did to other Americans. It was inflicted, and endured, by those members of the Special Forces who underwent the advanced form of training known as sere (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape). In these harsh exercises, brave men and women were introduced to the sorts of barbarism that they might expect to meet at the hands of a lawless foe who disregarded the Geneva Conventions. But it was something that Americans were being trained to resist, not to inflict.
[Read the entire piece at Vanity Fair.]
The video is not for children to watch, but very much for adults to watch and act against this obscenity of our government.
One can only guess how many innocents have suffered at the hands of the modern-day Torquemada: America under Bush and his assorted chickenhawks.
I have not been a fan of Hitchens' writing the last several years, but Hitchens deserves credit for his first-hand account exposing the cowardice and betrayal by the Bush administration.
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