For Hitchens, Torture is not Great

Christopher Hitchens once defiantly declared in a 2005 article for The Weekly Standard that "[p]rison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad." I believe fully that he continues to stand by this statement, as consistency—never mind his minor shift from supporting left- to right-wing causes—is a hallmark of any good polemicist.

This past May, the author agreed to undergo waterboarding, the interrogation technique used on terrorist suspects by the US government that also became the focal point for what constitutes "torture." In light of yesterday's New York Times' story indicating that Guantánamo interrogation tactics mirrored Chinese Communist techniques described in a 1957 Air Force study, the evidence that we've unleashed an army of amoral (and ineffective) Jack Bauers on the world becomes harder to ignore.

While not conceding much in Vanity Fair's "Believe Me, It's Torture"—Hitchens cannot resist denigrating the "moral equivalence" of linking US "torture" techniques with those of the murderers of Daniel Pearl—he manages to convince himself that torture is not great through arguments of logic and that "ticking bomb" question: "once you assume that you are in the right, what will you not do?"