The laws of war in the war on terror

I’ve just got round to reading the Christopher Hitchens piece on being waterboarded which everyone is talking about. It is definitely worth a look, it deals fairly with both sides of the argument.

Hitchens sums up the case that the proponents of waterboarding make thus:

As they have just tried to demonstrate to me, 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.

But the piece leaves you in no doubt that the technique is torture rather than just a harsh interrogation technique or any other such euphemism. At the risk of sounding trite, the reason that we shouldn’t legalise this kind of technique is because as a civilization we are better than that.