03 July 2008

What is Waterboarding?

WARNING: NOTHING ABOUT France below.

This is going to be a strange post because I'm going to direct you to a Vanity Fair website where writer Christopher Hitchens voluntarily submitted to a waterboarding session to help him understand what it's all about. It really is worth watching.

Quick background: waterboarding is a technique that has been used to try to get information from suspects being held by the United States at a military base in Cuba. The technique is very controversial and some question whether or not it counts as 'torture' -- as defined in the Geneva Conventions. I don't want to make this a political statement of any kind, I just want you to watch the video and leave your comment. Here's mine: Wow, they barely had to use any water!

Hitchens is a writer for Vanity Fair and he is interviewed after the experience. I think his full article on the experience can be seen in the current issue of the magazine. The clip is in Flash Media format so I can't embed it here (if I can I don't know how!). Here's the site where you can find the clip.

4 comments :

Unknown said...

This is really disturbing stuff. Consider how considerately he was beeing treated, and imagine the real thing, with professional interegators and prisoners!

Anonymous said...

I had no idea what it was. It doesn't seem that bad - but it must be. Wow.

Anonymous said...

That wasn't more than about 15 seconds. Can you imaging going through that for an hour. Or more?

Anonymous said...

Hate to ruin the party here, but it could be worse -- couldn't it?