An enterprising journalism school might want to start offering a one-day seminar in the effective staging of videotaped waterboarding. Getting under a wet towel is a surefire way to put your name out there. It’s sort of like the reality TV of journalism. Get a cheap camera, do something unpleasant, and welcome your new audience.
Before today, I had never heard of the Sun’s Oliver Harvey. But now that he got wet and held his breath for 12 seconds while being videotaped he’s become the subject of this post. Harvey is the latest in a string of writers who’ve taken this shortcut to a larger readership. Of all the volunteer splashees, Christopher Hitchens got the most mileage when he submitted himself to the whims of fake interrogators in 2008. This produced an immediately forgettable Vanity Fair article and an immortal YouTube video.
Apparently it eludes these eager bathers that as more of them get dunked for dough, the case for the unspeakable inhumanity of waterboarding becomes increasingly weak. In fact, there’s something wonderfully pro-American in all this. So evil are the wartime methods of the United States that they’ve inspired a succession of entrepreneurial self-administering copycats to capitalize on them in the free market. Tell me there’s no poetry in that. You don’t see the denizens of Fleet Street offering themselves up to the interrogation methods of the regimes they’re so eager to defend, do you? When you see an Iran apologist suffering the identical treatment of an Evin prison captive then we’ll talk.