Isaac King

There's a popular story that goes like this: Christopher Hitchens used to be in favor of the US waterboarding terrorists because he thought it wasn't bad enough to be considered torture. Then he had it tried on himself, and changed his mind, coming to believe it is torture and should not be performed. (Context for those unfamiliar: in the ~decade following 9/11, the US engaged in a lot of... questionable behavior to prosecute the war on terror, and there was a big debate on whether waterboarding should be permitted. Many other public figures also volunteered to undergo the procedure as a part of this public debate; most notably Sean Hannity, who was an outspoken proponent of waterboarding, yet welched on his offer and never tried it himself.) This story intrigued me because it's popular among both Hitchens' fans and his detractors. His fans use it as an example of his intellectual honesty and willingness to undergo significant personal costs in order to have accurate beliefs and improve the world. His detractors use it to argue that he's self-centered and unempathetic, only coming to care about a bad thing that's happening to others after it happens to him. But is the story actually true? Usually when there are two sides to an issue, one side will have an incentive to fact-check any false claims that the other side makes. An impartial observer can then look at the messaging from both sides to discover any flaws in the other. But if a particular story is convenient for both groups, then neither has any incentive to debunk it. I became suspicious when I tried going to the source of this story to see what Hitchens had written about waterboarding prior to his 2008 experiment, and consistently found these leads to evaporate. The part about him having it tried on himself and finding it tortureous is certainly true. He reported this himself in his Vanity Fair article Believe me, It's Torture. But what about before that? Did he ever think it wasn't torture? His artic