Jonah Goldberg, conversing with the Corner Kids:
So many readers have made variations of this point, many, many from personal experience:
After I was captured, my hands were tied behind my back and I was struck repeatedly in the face with an open hand. After enduring the beating I was thrown on the water board, where under questioning the enemy would drown you till the verge of losing consciousness, only to revive you and start all over again. Then a black bag was secured around my head and throat which made it difficult to breathe. I was confined to a three by four foot tiger cage with a coffee can for a toilet. Loud music blared from speakers in the compound and I was repeatedly dragged from my cage for more beatings and interrogation. At night when it was freezing the guards would pour cold water on me. I was deprived of any food for five straight days.
Sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it? Well that is only part of what EVERY U.S. Navy and Air Force pilot and flight crew goes through in survival school. The Army does it for their special forces guys as well. We do this to our own people for training but we can’t do it to terrorists? Incredible.
Elsewhere, Derbyshire (of course) brings up frat hazing again.
Is it just me, or does anyone else remember when “conservatives” knew the difference between consensual activities and State coercion? I’m waiting for the Corner Kidz to bring up S&M bars next. “Hey, look! Here’s someone bound and gagged, hung naked from a meat hook and whipped bloody and they like it! See, Abu Ghraib isn’t so bad! And we never even beheaded anyone yet!”
Question for Cornerites: Is this torture?
UPDATE: Jonah answers a critic who asks “dont you think its a bit preposterous to cite torture simulation as a reason that torture is acceptible? ‘Our soldiers experience torture simulation as part of their training. Thus it’s okay to torture prisoners.’ Do you actually see no difference between a simulation and the real thing? This is not just a ridiculously bad argument as a simple matter of rhetoric, it’s a morally despicable argument that reveals some seriously warped thinking.”
The answer? ” Of course I see the difference between the two: it’s a psychological difference.”
What an idiotic moral zero. Hey, Jonah. Is anyone locked up in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo voluntarily, that you know of?
UPDATE: I received this in email from an acquaintance who went through Air Force survival school in the late 80s:
I was a flight crew member, and I went through that training. The
correspondent is flat wrong or else he’s very dated; that is, he’s referring
to training in the 50s or 60s. The POW simulation phase at Fairchild AFB
was only about 24 hours. No one used physical violence, no water was dumped
on anyone, and no one was ducked in water. Indeed, throughout the period,
if there was a problem, a trainee could indicate this by using a phrase to
call time-out.Most of what happened was psychological–a sort of walk through of what
totalitarian states did–and it was explicitly made clear that even this
stuff was illegal under the Geneva Conventions.The only part that was true is the coffee can, the small cell (not a tiger
cage) and the loud music (They played the Dead Kennedys during my shift).
But that period was a matter of hours. They also put us in some small
enclosures for about twenty minutes: one that made you stand up, and another
that forced you to curl up into a ball. We went through some simulated
interrogations. They were stressful, but not violent.All in all, Boot Camp was worse than the POW training. I’d say the
experience was as traumatic as Hell Week for a fraternity. (And, unlike
Rush Limbaugh, my use of this analogy is accurate and warranted).