On being tortured

Ray Robison writes on his experience with what he thinks would qualify as torture, under definitions some folks want to use.

I write this in response to Christopher Hitchens recent voluntary experience of being water boarded. In nearly every significant way, the event I experienced and every American soldier experiences is comparable to water boarding.

They both cause temporary pain and choking. They cause fear. They cause one to consider the fact that they might not live. The environment was coercive, granted not as hostile as a terrorist faces, and a bit degrading as some punk takes a picture of you with snot trailing down your chin as you fight for untainted air.

I understand what Hitchens has to say. He makes a reasonable presentation of both sides of the issue of whether or not water boarding is torture. He decides it is.

I disagree. Discomfort does not rise to the level of torture. If so then the army tortured me three times in the gas chamber and every day with the pain and suffering I experienced by many miles run, pushups, and sit-ups. That physical pain is just as real, but nobody is ludicrous enough to consider that to be torture.

Fear is not torture. Do I now get to sue the producers of all those Freddy and Jason movies that scared me as a child? Of course not. Fear can be entertainment.

Do I now get to sue the army for the degradation I felt at having some smarmy punk snap away with a camera at my misery? Of course not, they now include those shots into a sort of end of basic training year-book from what I am told.

Pain, degradation, fear for your life; these are not pleasant, but unpleasant doesn't equal torture. In many ways, life is full of these things. We all experience emotional pain and most of us will experience the physical pain of aging. Some of us fear for our lives just in driving to work. We fear the inevitable, knowing that at some point all our lives will be touched by death.

Show me a terrorist who died from water boarding in US custody and I might find Hitchens' determination more grounded. Until he can show me something more extensive than temporary pain and fear, and a bit of a nighttime bugaboo reaction, then I have to respectfully disagree with his assessment.

In the final analysis, Robison writes:

Water boarding is not torture and can not be made to appear so by activists or journalists volunteering to undergo it. They may think they are giving themselves moral authority to denounce it, but they only expose their own moral vanity.