When Christopher Hitchens gets right down to it, he can be one heck of a grand journalist. Yes, when the discussion topic shifts toward religion, the atheist in him seems to get the better of his good sense, and he seems unable to sort out reason from anger. But when he just sets himself to the task of journalism, he can produce some truly amazing work.

I understand that in the U.S. right now, there is a huge debate going on over the interrogation methods used by U.S. intelligence gatherers when trying to extract information from captured jihadis, and whether those methods include or count as torture. It should be noted that the Church condemns torture as a grave moral evil, which it indeed is, and this is more or less the tone of the debate in the U.S. as well; on one hand, there are people arguing that it is a legitimate method of extracting information, and on the other there are people saying that it is wrong.

Into the middle of this comes Mr. Hitchens. The skillful journalist decided that there was only one way to get to the truth about waterboarding: experience if first-hand. And so he did.

You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it "simulates" the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning -— or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The "board" is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. 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.

...The interrogators would hardly have had time to ask me any questions, and I knew that I would quite readily have agreed to supply any answer. I still feel ashamed when I think about it. Also, in case it's of interest, I have since woken up trying to push the bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and claustrophobia. No doubt this will pass. As if detecting my misery and shame, one of my interrogators comfortingly said, "Any time is a long time when you're breathing water." I could have hugged him for saying so, and just then I was hit with a ghastly sense of the sadomasochistic dimension that underlies the relationship between the torturer and the tortured. I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong." Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

Yeah, it's torture.

Good on Hitchens for doing his level best to fully understand the process of waterboarding, and good on him for being so candid in his writing about it afterwards. This is an issue which needs to be brought to light and resolved, because it is unconscionable that the U.S. employ such techniques in its attempts to root out terrorism. Barbarity is for the enemy, not for those who supposedly value freedom.