This post is not complete without the photo:

On this subject, Joel asks:

After the short experience, [Hitchens] asks the question we should always be asking about torture: "What if they got the wrong guy?"

Ummm. He apparently lives. And gets his shirt as ruffled and wet as Ben after a walk to his car after work.

Our guys, as the article makes clear in the summary/subhead, undergo waterboarding as part of their training. If a stuffy journalist pulling a stunt can do it, I'd say it's not really torture. Not by historical standards, anyway. (C'mon, Hitch. You admit that you were in the wilds of North Carolina "preparing to be surprised by a team of extremely hardened veterans." Preparing certainly eliminates the element of surprise, eh Hitch? Who you foolin'? You tool.)

Hitch was also haunted by this clause in the contract he signed before his stunt:

“Water boarding” is a potentially dangerous activity in which the participant can receive serious and permanent (physical, emotional and psychological) injuries and even death, including injuries and death due to the respiratory and neurological systems of the body.

Yeah. And if I take any one of three dozen medications advertised on TV, I might also die of respiratory and neurological failure. Or I'll have a erection for a dangerously lengthy (heh) amount of time. Or I'll become sterile. Or I'll get rickets. Or, with some antidepressants, I might have suicidal thoughts (which is the definition of a failed antidepressant drug). Take that quivering passage by Hitch with a huge lump of salt.

I'm not saying that waterboarding is not unpleasant. But if waterboarding is the worst sort of "barbarism" our guys will meet at the hands of terrorists, they'd consider themselves quite fortunate. The usual methods of our enemy usually involve rusty scimitars, exposed necks and a video camera.

Oh, and Hitch is wrong about this:

But it was something that Americans were being trained to resist, not to inflict.

That is obviously not true. We do inflict it, on very select, high-priority captives for very specific purposes — to break them of their resistance training for the purpose of gaining valuable intelligence to save innocent American lives and protect this country. Sorry, not losing sleep over this campy stunt and what Hitch pretends it means for the supposed decline of American values.