America's double standard on human rights

When Chinese, Japanese, Africans, or Cambodians do it America calls it a "war crime." When Americans do it, Obama calls it:

“time for reflection, not retribution.”

To Obama's credit, he was letting the lower-ranking CIA guys off the hook when he said that today, not upper level officials in the Bush administration. The best news of all was that Obama did not stand in the way of the planned release of torture memos. A NY Times report on the release states:

An early review suggested that the administration had declassified the vast bulk of the memos’ contents, a defeat for C.I.A. officials who had argued that such a step could be harmful to national security. The documents included Justice Department memos from 2002 and 2005 authorizing the C.I.A. to employ a number of aggressive techniques — including sleep deprivation, exposure to extreme temperatures and “waterboarding,” the near-drowning technique.

To remind ourselves at what's at stake with respect to these memos, let's watch journalist Hitch undergo what the NY Times refers to as an "aggressive technique":


Christopher Hitchens also wrote about the experience of being water-boarded in Vanity Fair.