“Believe Me, It’s Torture,”

I don't really like Christopher Hitchens. He's a Marxist, he supports the Iraq War and he's a drunk. Signs of a great personnality... Also, he thinks waterboarding isn't torture. Or at least he used to. When he claimed on Slate.com that waterboarding isn't torture, his outraged commenters challenged him to try it out. And to his credit, he did try it.

You can watch the video of the waterboarding session here.

As you can see, he didn't hold for very long. And he was forced to admit in this Vanity Fair article:

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.

It's a bitch to drown? No shit!

Also, a NYT article related to this.

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

How many kinds of stupid is this adminstration?