Awful anecdotes from annals of the GWOT
If these seven anecdotes in Newsweek reporter Daniel Klaidman’s new book are true, there is even more wrong with the Obama administration’s terrorism policy than we thought. From Obama’s alleged obsession with getting Anwar al-Awlaki (sounding an awful lot like Commander Codpiece: “I want Awlaki. Don’t let up on him”) to Harold Koh only having half an hour to look through some pictures in order to decide which targets were legally subject to killing, they’re all horrifying.
But, of all of them, this may be the one I find most confounding:
The late Christopher Hitchens scored a hit with his Vanity Fair piece recounting what it was like to be waterboarded, reaching Attorney General Holder and influencing his decision to launch an investigation into the way the U.S. interrogated its detainees. In his 2008 column “Believe Me, It’s Torture,” the polemicist wrote about his staged abduction at a location tucked away somewhere in North Carolina. After reading the article, Holder was reportedly entranced by the accompanying video, which showed the (rather out-of-shape) Hitchens hold out for a little more than 10 seconds before breaking under the torture technique. “Watching the video,” Klaidman writes, “Holder was both mesmerized and repulsed.”
The article and video spurred Holder to look more closely at the interrogation tactics of the Bush era, and he was “increasingly convinced that he would need to launch an investigation, or at least a preliminary inquiry to determine whether a full-blown probe was warranted.”
The country had been talking about waterboarding for years by that point. This video of Matt Lauer (Matt Lauer!) grilling president Bush in 2006 shows that it was a very contentious issue long before Hitchens wrote his column. Ron Susskind had written The One Percent Doctrine two years earlier. Jane Mayer had written her groundbreaking story on the black sites in the New Yorker the year before.
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