I feel strongly both ways

Christopher Hitchens, clearly having decided that first-hand experience is not overrated, had himself subjected to water boarding in order to better assess whether it amounts to torture, and if it is the sort of thing in which the US should be dabbling.

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. The “board” is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and—as you might expect—inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.

After the experience, Mr. Hitchens comes down on both sides of the torture issue:

a man who has been waterboarded may well emerge from the experience a bit shaky, but he is in a mood to surrender the relevant information and is unmarked and undamaged and indeed ready for another bout in quite a short time. When contrasted to actual torture, waterboarding is more like foreplay. No thumbscrew, no pincers, no electrodes, no rack. Can one say this of those who have been captured by the tormentors and murderers of (say) Daniel Pearl? On this analysis, any call to indict the United States for torture is therefore a lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilization and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out, and ultimately to bring it down. I myself do not trust anybody who does not clearly understand this viewpoint.

However, he lands rather more firmly on the anti-side:

Against it, however, I call as my main witness Mr. Malcolm Nance.

I passed one of the most dramatic evenings of my life listening to his cold but enraged denunciation of the adoption of waterboarding by the United States. The argument goes like this:

1. Waterboarding is a deliberate torture technique and has been prosecuted as such by our judicial arm when perpetrated by others.

2. If we allow it and justify it, we cannot complain if it is employed in the future by other regimes on captive U.S. citizens. It is a method of putting American prisoners in harm’s way.

3. It may be a means of extracting information, but it is also a means of extracting junk information.

4. It opens a door that cannot be closed. Once you have posed the notorious “ticking bomb” question, and once you assume that you are in the right, what will you not do? Waterboarding not getting results fast enough? The terrorist’s clock still ticking? Well, then, bring on the thumbscrews and the pincers and the electrodes and the rack.

Unfortunately, Mr. Hitchens and Mr. Nance seem to have reached their destination without a starting point. Having failed to define torture, they reached their there from nowhere.

Presuming a captive possesses valuable information, there is a range of means by which to extract it, from merely asking the question, through soft cushions and comfy chairs, to thumb screws and the rack. That continuum starts with the innocuous, traverses the various provinces of unpleasant, and ends in the obviously repellent.

Clearly, we need some means to discern where the merely unpleasant ends and torture begins. Otherwise, any interrogation technique more arduous than a stay at a four-star hotel in Palm Springs steps beyond the pale.

Salim Hamdam was the driver for Osama bin Laden. Recently he was convicted of providing material support for terrorism. While at Guantanomo, according to human rights groups, he was subjected to harsh treatment:

... sleep deprivation, harassment and inappropriate touching by a female guard.

Oh, the humanity.

Suspecting inappropriate touching by a female guard and the rack are not morally equivalent, I offer this definition:

Any treatment to which a prisoner is subjected that leaves any after effects discernible by a thorough physical examination immediately after the event constitutes torture

Having been, in a previous life, subjected to stress positions, sleep deprivation, harassment and extremely close confinement -- and, no, I am not talking about modern air travel here -- I can conclusively say they are very unpleasant.

But torturous? No.

By my definition, waterboarding is in that province of unpleasantness infinitesimally close to torture.

Does that mean I think the US should "routinely" resort to waterboarding? No.

While I do not find much of Mr. Nance's counterargument very persuasive, particularly the oft repeated line of extracting junk information, so far Islamism does not pose an existential threat; preventing an outrage or rolling up a cell, though obviously to be wished for, needs to be held against the costs of doing so.

The hyperventilation of human-rights groups, or the flutterings of Andrew Sullivan, are often nearly beyond parody. However, those litanies of the merely unpleasant gain traction when the deeply unpleasant is also lurking out there.

So, while, in theory, I find the "ticking bomb" argument a compelling reason to waterboard, in practical fact no bomb this side of a nuke ticks loudly enough to offset the costs of standing too closely to the methods of the Inquisition.