Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Hitchens, and Waterboarding

This rather strange news development caught me for two reasons. Firstly, the obvious religious martyrdom explication delivered by the supposed mastermind was unusual in that he hadn't delivered such a claim before. One would ask, therefore, why had he not flown one of the planes into the building himself rather than have one of his abhorrent croons to do it for him if he's so beset by the concept of martyrdom? We've been told for a while now, and I believe it myself, that there's a chance the individuals who organise these attacks seldom have the total conviction they instill upon their sycophantic fleet. For example, the recent footage of a drugged teenage girl in Baghdad being strapped with a bomb by a group of jihadists reminded us of just how appallingly warped these people may become under the garb of Islam. What's more, the convict, currently held in Gitmo, looks strikingly dishevelled in all the currently circulating photographs. Is that such a surprise, however? This leads me nicely onto my main observation. Christopher Hitchens' waterboarding session over the summer exposed the lamely apologetic term, "aggressive interrogation" as wholly inappropriate. Indeed, the title of his piece, "Believe Me, It's Torture" deserves our attention. Similarly, I distinctly remember him saying from the accompanying video that "it would be bad enough if you did have something, [...] but what if you didn't have anything? What if they'd got the wrong guy? Then you really would be in danger of losing your mind very quickly?" Does Khalid Sheikh Mohammed not have the look of someone who has lost his mind? A rejuvenation of the debate surrounding the ethics of torture is at stake here and that may be the subject of a much lengthier post. Yet, for the purposes of my current avenue of thought, I simply refer to Hitchens' pertinent claim - if the American services have got the wrong guy, then waterboarding is the best way to make someone confess to something they haven't actually done. Apparently, Sheikh Mohammed held out for an impressive two minutes before being reduced to a quivering, sobbing wreck.