In Gitmo, No One Can Hear You Scream the Safe Word

Last February, Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Graydon Carter asked writer Christopher Hitchens if he would be willing to subject himself to the form of torture known as waterboarding.

Hitchens accepted.

Interrogator's assistant: Enjoy the music. Let you know when it's fifteen minutes?

Interrogator:: Yes.

Interrogator: Fifteen on, fifteen off.

Third time through if he hasn't done it we'll go fifteen off, thirty on.

Fifteen twice and then thirty.

All right, listen up, I'm going to give you some instructions. Do you understand me?

Hitchens: Yes, I do.

Interrogator: We're going to place metal objects in each of your hands.

These objects are to be release if you experience unbearable stress.

As soon as you release one or both, this exercise and demonstration will end immediately.

Do you understand?

Hitchens: Yes, I do.

Interrogator: You have a code word that you can use for distress. That word is “ R-E-D. Say the word.

Hitchens: Red.

Interrogator: If you use that word at any point during this exercise we will immediately discontinue and cease this exercise and demonstration.

Do you understand?

Hitchens: Yes, sir.

Interrogator: Again, what is the word?

Hitchens: Red.

I'm glad Hitchens and his interrogator got that settled before they began water play time. Honestly, though, they seemed so perfect together that I'm sure they could have done fifteen minutes of waterboarding without a safe word and Hitch-y would have been pulled through just fine. By fine, I mean without any “organ failure, permanent damage, or death,” or as we in this country call it, “torture.”

Which brings me to my problem with this little piece of Geraldo-esque sensationalism journalism. It's not journalism at all; It's spectacle presented as journalism.

Ask yourself, what does this tell me about waterboarding or torture or what's going on in Gitmo that I didn't know before? If you learned anything, then you can say this is journalism. You can't say that, though, can you?

All that video demonstrates is that a doughy, chain-smoking scotch-monger whose chief form of aerobic activity is sweating turns pussy* after fifteen seconds of waterboarding. And we knew that already. So how is any of that news? And, of course, the answer is, it isn't.

The most liberal critic would say, “Well, it does show the public what waterboarding is,” and for a moment, I was willing to be liberal in my judgment, to give Vanity Fair and Hitchens the benefit of the doubt.

But here's the thing. This isn't about waterboarding. It's about waterboarding Hitchens. It's about “Step right up. Pay your fee. See a celebrity get tortured, and all for the price of a magazine or a click of the mouse!” Well, gee, Mr. Barnum, I'd pay $3 to see that.

But I won't be paying to see news. I'll be paying for entertainment. For this to be informational, for this to be news, somewhere along the line, someone would have had to have said that in cases of actual waterboarding, the victim does not get emergency bars that they can drop or safe words they can utter to end the session. Someone would have to make it clear that in real waterboarding, this goes on until the tormenters—not the victims— have had enough. Or they could should what a real human being looks like when something this horrid is inflicted upon him, the gagging, the spasms, the fighting to stay sane and alive—all the physical reactions to being slowly drowned for information. Reflex signals and safe words and genteel “discomfort” professionals are not what is going on in prisons and clinics and safe houses and other assorted hellholes around the world. This a facsimile stripped of the horror of the real thing. That point has to be made. No disclaimer, no news.

And that's okay. I mean, I'd pay much more than $3 or a click of the mouse to see a fat, Iraqi-invasion cheerleading blowhard get a little sample of the treatment he's been pooh-poohing for years now. Hitchens championed this war, backed this administration all along the way. He encouraged them to go into Iraq and then, afterward, he pooh-poohed and belittled the suffering inflicted by American soldiers and agents on captives in places like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay and unnamed places in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. To see him say he couldn't handle 15 seconds of what they have to endure for much, much longer without the knowledge he had—that he was not in any danger, that he would walk away from this alive and relatively well— is just and satisfying. That's a must see at any price.

Of course, now, he's going to be impossible to live with. As they say, there's nothing worse than a convert.

*I'm an even bigger pussy than Hitchens because I would have been screaming the safe word and throwing metal rods as soon as I heard that fucking music. Oh, sweet thumping Euro-trash! That was frightening. I'll never sleep peacefully again without the use of E and some glow sticks.