Christopher Hitchens (Photo: Mark Mahaney for The New York Times)
Last year’s waterboarding debate turned on a simple question answerable with a yes, no or maybe: Is it torture? Now, Christopher Hitchens, who was caught in the crossfire when he suggested that it was merely “extreme interrogation,” has re-entered the debate seven months later armed with firsthand experience.
Following in the footsteps of John Kiriakou, the former C.I.A. operative, and Daniel Levin, the Bush administration lawyer, Mr. Hitchens was waterboarded. (It was far from his first bit of dangerous research for Vanity Fair. In November, he wrote of a Brazillian waxing.)
While others have described the waterboarding experience to a large audience, he may be the most articulate:
In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and—as you might expect—inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.
Thanks to a potentially disturbing video accompanying the article, the reader is also put in the room to watch from another angle. Mr. Hitchens is led into a nondescript room by hooded interrogators who speak in short sentences about how to call it quits. The prolific provocateur is oddly reduced to short, meek responses just before it begins.
From both views, you may draw your own conclusions, though his ruling, which appeared in the headline, was unequivocal: “Believe Me, It’s Torture.”
In the video, he elaborated on the mental trauma that followed the technique, which leaves little obvious damage even though it is potentially fatal. “I think I sympathize a good deal more because as a result of this very brief experience, if I do anything that gets my heart rate up — I’m breathing hard, I’m panting — I have a slight panic sensation,” he said. Nightmares have followed as well. “Lately I’ve been having this feeling of waking up and being smothered.”
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