Writer Christopher Hitchens beat cigarettes this year, but he couldn't take waterboarding for more than a few seconds.
In the new Vanity Fair, the prolific British ex-pat describes how underwent a waterboarding experiment in the hands of tough U.S. counterterrorism experts at a secret site in Western North Carolina in May.
He says that he's embarrased at how little time it took for him to crack and trigger the pre-arranged "stop signal." but in the disturbing video on VF's Web site I counted it out at 13 seconds.
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.
The operative words here are any answers. As I wrote earlier this week, 15 top fomer FBI, CIA and military interrogation specialists meeting in Washington last week declared that one reason torture isn't very useful is that its subjects will say anything to stop the pain -- there's no guarantee that any of it is the truth.
Until his own experiment, the influential Hitchens labelled waterboarding merely "extreme interrogation." But the headline on the VF piece is, "Believe Me, It's Torture."
Hitchens' interrogators warned him that even his brief experiment could have lasting effects.
And so it has.
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.
Hitchens allowed to his interrogator that he felt shame from surrendering when just a cup or less of water was dripped onto the towel over his face.
The man gently told him, "Any time is a long time when you're breathing water."
Says Hitchens now: "If waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture."
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