“The board is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered.” Waterboarding was inflicted and endured by the Special Forces who underwent advance training to survived SERE know as (Survival, Evasions, Resistance, and Escape). These were harsh exercises that men and women were introduced to just in case one day they might experience it. They were being trained to resist and not to inflict. But is this torture that they undergoing? Hitchens wanted to find out for himself.
Hitchens wanted to experience waterboarding for himself so that he can determine if it should be considered a form of torture. He actually places himself into the world of waterboarding and undergoes the process, he was now a victim, his hands tied down by a belt, eyesight blinded by a black mask and his body tied down onto a board. They insists that the treatment simulates the f
eeling of drowning. But according to hitches it was not the case, “You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning.” (Hitchens) He held his breath for a while but as soon as he inhale he felt like there was damped clothes around his nostrils. Unable to determine whether he was breathing in or out he panic. He signal that he wanted to be pull up and felt the unbelievable relief.
“Water boarding is a potentially dangerous activity in which the participant can receive serious and permanent (physical, emotional, and psychological) including injuries and death due to the respiratory and neurological systems of the body”. (Hitchens) Hitchens added this line from the contract because it shows the possibility of what could happen to him. Hitchens’s believes the idea of water boarding is a terrible event that promotes torture. Being woken up out of his sleep pushing bedcovers over his face because he finds himself sensation of smothering and claustrophobia because of the experience he went through. “I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong,...