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3 pack to make up for a few missed days...

Believe Me, It’s Torture”

Hitchens’ account of his experiment with waterboarding. He points out that this technique is “… a means of extracting information, but it is also a means of extracting junk information.” He describes waterboarding by writing “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…”

His conclusions? “I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: ‘If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.’ Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.”

Hitchens after waterboarding:

New Learning: “…the CIA sources for the Washington Post story on waterboarding conceded that the information they got out of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was ‘not all of it reliable.’ ”

New Word: S.E.R.E. = military training for “survival, escape, resistance and evasion.”

“Iran’s Waiting Game”

Hitchens’ 2005 account of Iran as in a “state of suspended animation.” He describes Iran as a “as if” society where the common people live “as if” the had the freedoms of the west and the mullahs lead as if the were pious…even as they hypocritically violate all tenets of piety. Said for a country that was famous for ‘…poetry, for philosophy, for backgammon, for chess, for architecture, for polo, for gardens, and for wine.”

Great, revealing quote from a local about visiting Ayatollah Khomeini’s tomb, “…and ‘why the fuck,’ said the guard at the subway station when I asked directions, ‘would you want to go to that bastard’s grave?’ ”

Khomeini's tomb:

New Learning: It is against the law to shake a women’s hand in public in Iran.

New Word: sayyid = Muslims claiming decent from Muhammad through his grandson Husayn.

“Long Live Democratic Seismology”

Hitchens’ argument that the social policy of many countries (Turkey, Pakistan) lead to mega cities susceptible to huge loss of life during earthquakes from “an unrecognized weapon of mass destruction: houses.” Of particular concern is Iran where an earthquake would lead not only to great destruction from the seismic event, but also from the potential breach of secret nuclear facilities. He argues that “While the ‘negotiations’ on Iran’s weaponry are being artificially protracted by an irrational and corrupt regime, it should become part of our humanitarianism and our public diplomacy to warn the Iranian people of the man-made reasons that the results of a natural calamity would be hideously multiplied in their case.”

New Learning: Winner of a 1930’s in-house competition at the Times of London for most boring headline, “Small Earthquake in Chile: Not Many Dead”

New Word: Unidad Popular = movement that backed the Allende Presidency in Chile in 1970.