Did Christopher Hitchens change his mind about waterboarding?

post by Isaac King (KingSupernova) · 2024-09-15T08:28:09.451Z · LW · GW · 22 comments

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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 article on the subject doesn't make any mention of changing his mind, and it perhaps lightly implies that he always had these beliefs. He says, for example:

In these harsh [waterboarding] exercises, brave men and women were introduced to the sorts of barbarism that they might expect to meet at the hands of a lawless foe who disregarded the Geneva Conventions. But it was something that Americans were being trained to resist, not to inflict. [Link to an article explaining that torture doesn't work.]

[And later:]

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[.]

In a video interview he gave about a year later, he said:

There was only one way I felt I could advance the argument, which was to see roughly what it was like.

The loudest people on the internet about this were... not promising. Shortly after the Vanity Fair article, the ACLU released an article titled "Christopher Hitchens Admits Waterboarding is Torture", saying:

You have to hand it to him: journalist Christopher Hitchens, who previously discounted that waterboarding was indeed torture, admits in the August issue of Vanity Fair that it is, indeed, torture.

But they provide no source for this claim.

As I write this, Wikipedia says:

Hitchens, who had previously expressed skepticism over waterboarding being considered a form of torture, changed his mind.

No source is provided for this either.

Yet it's repeated everywhere. The top comments on the Youtube video. Highly upvoted Reddit posts. Etc.

Sources for any of these claims were quite scant. Many people cited "sources" that, upon me actually reading them, had nothing to do with the claim. Often these "sources" were themselves just some opinion piece from a Hitchens-disliker themselves spreading the rumor with no further sources of their own.

Frankly, many of these people seemed to have extremely poor reading/listening comprehension. For example, christopherhitchens.net affirms the story that he changed his mind from "not torture and morally permissible" to "torture and unacceptable". I reached out to the owner to ask for a source, and they told me to watch his Vanity Fair video, saying:

he's interviewed about it and is quite explicit that he believes it's torture, shouldn't be allowed, and wanted to prove it by undergoing it himself.

This A) contradicts their own website, now claiming that he never changed his mind at all, and B), it is false that the video includes anything like that. The only statement he makes in that video that bears any relation to his prior beliefs is:

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 and I'm breathing hard, panting, I have a slight panic sensation that I'm not going to be able to catch my breath again.

Not particularly enlightening.

I wasn't the first to have this concern. On the Christopher Hitchens subreddit, one user made a post asking for evidence that he had ever believed waterboarding to be acceptable.

Several comments ignored the question entirely and rambled on about unrelated tangents. One commenter said Hitchens had been more explicit about his support for waterboarding in TV interviews, but did not say which one. (I spent quite a while searching and was unable to find any such interview posted online.) Several other comments claimed that the story was false, and he was always opposed to waterboarding. But none of them provided a source for that claim either! Infuriating.

Ultimately, I could fine three articles that Christopher Hitchens wrote prior to the Vanity Fair experiment that people cited in support of this story.

In A War to Be Proud of:

Let me begin with a simple sentence that, even as I write it, appears less than Swiftian in the modesty of its proposal: “Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad.”

I could undertake to defend that statement against any member of Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, and I know in advance that none of them could challenge it, let alone negate it. Before March 2003, Abu Ghraib was an abattoir, a torture chamber, and a concentration camp. Now, and not without reason, it is an international byword for Yankee imperialism and sadism. Yet the improvement is still, unarguably, the difference between night and day.

In Abolish the CIA:

At a time when Congress and the courts are conducting important hearings on the critical question of extreme interrogation, and at a time when accusations of outright torture are helping to besmirch and discredit the United States all around the world, a senior official of the CIA takes the unilateral decision to destroy the crucial evidence.

In Confessions of a Dangerous Mind:

The man whose story of rough interrogation has just been published in Time had planned to board a United Airlines flight and crash it into a skyscraper. I want to know who his friends and contacts were, and so do you, hypocrite lecteur.

You may desire this while also reserving the right to demand that he has a lawyer present at all times. But please observe where we stand now. Alberto Gonzales was excoriated even for asking, or being asked, about the applicability of Geneva rules. Apparently, Guantanamo won’t do as a holding pen until we decide how to handle and classify these people. But meanwhile, neither will it do to “render” any suspects to their countries of origin. How many alternatives does this leave? Is al-Qaida itself to be considered a “ticking bomb” or not? How many of those who express concern about Guantanamo have also been denouncing the administration for being too lenient about ignoring warnings and missing opportunities for a pre-atrocity roundup? I merely ask.

[The interrogation at hand being this one, which mentions the use of waterboarding.]

The first quote from  A War to Be Proud of seems completely irrelevant to me and I don't understand why anyone would cite it as supporting evidence. Believing that conditions got better is entirely compatible with waterboarding being torture. (It could be less bad than other forms, or occur less frequently. And Hitchens agreed that more traditional torture was happening there anyway, so his statement must include those too.)

However the other two do paint a picture that is generally in accordance with the story. He describes waterboarding as "rough interrogation", and while this is not technically at odds with it being torture (I would argue that torture is the roughest interrogation there is), it does seem like a euphemism that was likely chosen to set waterboarding apart from other forms of torture.

Additionally, in A Moral Chernobyl, Hitchens comes out strongly against the US torturing people. Combined with his support for waterboarding in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, this logically implies that he must believe them to be mutually exclusive.

Still, this is all just inference. Some of those articles were written years apart, so his beliefs could have changed in between, rendering derivations from combinations of those articles invalid. So to be sure, I tried reaching out to people who knew him personally.

I first reached out to Vanity Fair to ask why they had made the offer to Christopher in the first place. Unfortunately they did not respond. I tried contacting Graydon Carter, the Vanity Fair editor-in-chief who proposed the story, via two of his personal email addresses, but he didn't respond either.

I did get a reply from his brother Peter Hitchens, but it was unhelpful. He and Christopher were somewhat estranged and Peter didn't recall any discussions about this point in particular, saying only:

The only openly expressed opinion of his that I know of is in the Vanity Fair article which you have doubtless studied carefully. I never discussed it with him. On so many subject we were so far apart that it was better to discuss literature or the distant past than to try to debate them. That said, some of his pro-violence language (about bullets being able to pass through the Koran, for instance) in the months after September 11 hints at a rather macho view of all aspects of war.  

I reached out to one or two other of his personal friends (those for whom I could find contact information), but got no reply. The only seriously useful lead I got was from Malcolm Nance, a military officer whom Christopher Hitchens mentioned discussing the issue with in his Vanity Fair article.

Nance was an outspoken opponent of waterboarding, and stated on Twitter that Hitchens had first reached out to him to get himself waterboarded as a part of their discussions on the subject. (Nance declined, so Hitchens went with the other team seen in the video.)

Malcolm has a Substack blog and I was able to get in contact with him there, and finally got a helpful response:

If you read towards the end of that Vanity Fair article, he and I had a long discussion about this. He was a proponent of torture. However, I tried to convince him that he was going about it all wrong. Then when he went through that amateur waterboarding, he changed his mind. [As] simple as that.

Finally! A clear answer from someone who had directly discussed the matter with him personally.

My only reservation is that Malcom Nance seems to be... an excitable individual. A look over his Substack articles and Twitter feed reveal copious exaggeration and simplistic, hyper-emotional language. So it strikes me as plausible that he misinterpreted ambivalent statements from Hitchens. (This is supported by Malcom's claim that Hitchens was "a proponent of torture", which is clearly false going by Christopher's public articles on the subject. The question is only over whether Hitchens considered waterboarding to be a form of torture, and therefore permissible or not, which Malcolm seems to have not understood.)

Still, when several individually-questionable pieces of evidence are pointing in one direction, and nothing in particular is pointing in the other, that seems like the correct conclusion. I think the story is probably true.

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