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Author Christopher Hitchens voluntarily underwent a waterboarding treatment, in order to add his firsthand experience to the torture debate:

I do have a fear of drowning that comes from a bad childhood moment on the Isle of Wight, when I got out of my depth. As a boy reading the climactic torture scene of 1984, where what is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world, I realize that somewhere in my version of that hideous chamber comes the moment when the wave washes over me.

Hitchens took two brave dunks into the tank before quickly succumbing to sheer panic.

As if detecting my misery and shame, one of my interrogators comfortingly said, “Any time is a long time when you’re breathing water.” I could have hugged him for saying so, and just then I was hit with a ghastly sense of the sadomasochistic dimension that underlies the relationship between the torturer and the tortured. 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.

The entire article is thoughtful and not at all a typical vitriolic Hitchens piece, and is worth reading in its entirety.

John Cole at the Balloon Juice blog asks, “Can the indictments start now?”

Well, I’m convinced now:

Offered without comment:

(via Teh Sadly)

Scout Tufankjian has posted a stunning gallery of her photographs of the Obama campaign, from the beginning to the present.

Particularly inspiring is the gallery of Obama supporters – Scout would hand a small chalkboard to a supporter, ask them to write a few words describing their support, and then photograph the result.

Last week the mainstream political media got the vapors over Little Scottie McClellan’s assertions that they were complicit lapdogs in the run-up to the Iraq war.  Gasp!  It was rather fun to watch, really.

The Washington press corps is collectively as incapable of honest self-reflection as the so-called “media critics” among them (see: Kurtz comma Howard), and no one takes them on quite as well as Glennzilla.  Here’s Glenn on LA Times media critic Tim Rutten’s assertion that ”contradicting the administration’s assessment of Saddam Hussein’s aims” in the prelude to the war was both impossible and mindlessly adversarial:

How did Woodward and Bernstein uncover what the Nixon criminals did since they kept it secret? It must have been impossible! How did Dana Priest uncover the CIA Black Sites in Eastern Europe without being able to go there and visit them? How did Jim Risen and Eric Lichtblau find out that the Bush administration was eavesdropping on Americans without the warrants required by law? It’s called “reporting”: the process of finding out, through investigation, that which the Government seeks to conceal. Why does that need to be explained to the “media critic” of The Los Angeles Times? If he doesn’t understand that, what does he understand?

Go read Glenn’s whole post.

(via Salon)