Christopher Hitchens
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Christopher Hitchens was a British-American journalist and author whose 2008 filmed self-experiment with waterboarding John Kiriakou treats as the canonical rebuttal to those who describe the technique as "not a big deal."

Why he did it

The experiment was not conducted at a distance from Kiriakou. Asked directly whether he had ever corresponded with Hitchens, Kiriakou's answer is that he had: "yeah, I was in touch with Christopher Hitchens. He, we talked about waterboarding and what it felt like. He thought that I was exaggerating, and so he did it. And I wasn't exaggerating. It was as bad as I told him it was going to be."

Kiriakou recounts the sequence: Hitchens was placed on his back, a towel was laid across his face, and he expressed misplaced confidence he would be able to breathe. He lasted, in Kiriakou's telling, about "seventeen seconds" before he jumped up.

What mattered more to Kiriakou than the length of the demonstration was what followed. "For the rest of his life, every time he couldn't breathe for a second, he would have panic attacks. Because of the impact of waterboarding had on him." He has also heard it described in stronger terms, that Hitchens "never really got over the fake waterboarding", and does not dispute it. Kiriakou closes the anecdote with the point he says the corollary makes on the non-specialists: "Believe me, it's torture."

As the benchmark

The Hitchens experiment has become Kiriakou's reference for whether a given demonstration is the real thing. When the podcaster Julian Dorey told him privately that he was going to be waterboarded on camera so that people could see what actual waterboarding is, Kiriakou's immediate reaction was that this was exactly what Christopher Hitchens had done, and he approved, while warning him it was awful, on the basis that "we waterboarded each other in training, and it's terrible."

The video that arrived did not meet the standard. Rather than being strapped to a board with cloth in the mouth and water poured over the face, the subject was sitting on a bench with his head down while water was poured on his head, a procedure Kiriakou lets his interlocutor compare to the service one pays for at a Turkish bath.

Kiriakou's estimate of the man

Kiriakou's admiration is unreserved on the writing and withheld on the politics. Hitchens was "a brilliant writer, dedicated analyst, deep thinker, renowned atheist," and Kiriakou judges that "his premature death was bad for journalism."

Against that he sets a standing grievance: "I have to admit, I was pissed off at Christopher Hitchens because he supported the invasion of Iraq." Hitchens later said he felt he had been duped; Kiriakou's gloss is that he was "maybe duped by the bottom of a whiskey bottle, but that's just me."

He credits him for one last consistency. Hitchens made sure in advance that everybody knew that if, moments before his death, he appeared to decide God was real and ask to be baptised, it would be the chemical dump in his brain talking and not something he meant. Kiriakou, who says he dislikes last-minute conversions, notes that Hitchens did not do it: "good on him for that."

See also

- Waterboarding
- John Kiriakou
