Did Christopher Hitchens change his mind about waterboarding?
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 persecute 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.
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.
Funny how I find myself agreeing with everything except for the last paragraph, which I would replace with something like: “if this is the best evidence you can get, maybe it’s time to admit that you have no evidence”.
I mean, in a universe where Hitchens actually defended waterboarding (and it was a topic important enough for him that he actually tried it), we would expect to find stronger evidence than “one blogger said so” and “it makes a good story”. Like, he would actually mention it somewhere in writing or in an interview.
It can be shockingly difficult to track down stuff like this. Even the most high-profile magazines like Time or Newsweek can be hard to get a copy of if you aren’t in exactly the right place or if they happen to have not digitized a particular range or your citation isn’t exactly right. Television is even worse. Archives of somewhere like CNN are… hard. If you know someone said something at exactly 12:11PM on 15 September 2004 on CNN, on what was perhaps the most watched & influential TV channel in the world, you may seriously struggle to get it if it’s not already conveniently excerpted from fourth-hand copies of copies of copies on YouTube.
(This reminds me of a BBC TV documentary on cats and life in cat colonies that I wanted to watch back in 2018. It was a high-profile documentary, even published as a book, and I wanted to watch it because it apparently covered parts that the book did not. After a bunch of searching, I concluded that I had exactly 2 options for accessing it at the time: I could either drive several hundred miles to an obscure library in North Carolina that still had one of the only VHS tapes in the world according to WorldCat, and hope that it worked, and maybe bring along a VHS player just in case; or I could fly to London, and submit a request in writing to the BBC archives to be allowed to watch it—and naturally, I would be strictly forbidden from making a copy or taking any photos of it etc. Meanwhile, the book was a few clicks & $13 to scan… I scanned the book. I have not seen the documentary.)
I recall reading a few months ago an enlightening article on Jon Stewart in the 2000s: why could Stewart marshal so many devastating clips of people saying stuff on TV? Because old stuff on TV disappeared the instant it was broadcast unless someone made a point then and there of videotaping it and making it ‘go viral’. Otherwise, it vanished without a trace, as if it were an opium dream, with any copy buried deep in the TV network’s vaults.* Technically, it still existed, but it was unfindable, like the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark. (Sort of like social media: if you don’t note down something right now, you may never refind it, even assuming it’s not deleted or anything.) So people spoke freely and never worried about old clips resurfacing. But Stewart invested in researchers and paying for access to archives, and pulling up the newly-digitized records to take down guests or subjects.
I imagine there will be similar issues in trying to understand 2010--2030 streaming and Tiktok culture. In theory, it should all be super-legible and everything should be able to be immaculately cited… In practice, you’re quickly reduced to rumors of rumors and you know more about the Roman Empire millennia ago than some events beheld by millions on streams just years ago.
* Itself far from guaranteed. You may know about the BBC Dr Who episodes and other lost TV broadcasts, but this is endemic. Hence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes
This is one technical point that younger people are often amazed to hear, that for a long time the overwhelming majority of TV broadcast was perfectly ephemeral, producing no records at all. Not just that the original copies were lost or never digitised or impossible to track down or whatever, but that nothing of the sort ever existed. The technology for capturing, broadcasting, and displaying a TV signal is so much easier than the tech for recording one, that there were several decades when the only recordings of TV came from someone setting up a literal film camera pointed at a TV and capturing the screen on photographic film, and that didn’t happen much.
(This also meant that old TV was amazingly low latency. The camera sensor scanned through, producing the signal, which went through some analog circuitry and straight onto the air, into the circuitry of your TV and right onto the screen. The scanning of the electron beam across the screen was synchronised with the scanning of the camera sensor. At no point was even a single frame stored—I need to check the numbers but I think if you were close to the TV station, you’re looking at the top of the frame before the bottom of the frame is even captured by the camera)
I think you are vastly overestimating the 2001-2010 internet’s ability to preserve and catalog evidence.
I would like to add a small element of purely anecdotal evidence to this debate as an avid follower of the “warblogs” and discussions at the time which is slightly different from the “he was pro torture before he was against it” take in your post. My general understanding is that Hitchens was always against “torture” (disagree with Nance’s take on this) but there was both a legal and moral debate about water boarding qualifying as torture. For example see this NPR story from 2014: https://www.npr.org/2014/01/07/260155065/cia-lawyer-waterboarding-wasnt-torture-then-and-isnt-torture-now
Hitchens decided to answer the question for himself and came firmly down on the “it is torture and therefore wrong” side of the debate afterwards. He was initially wrong but continued to be intellectually consistent throughout.
This matches my memory as well.
And mine.
Nice scholarship
I kind of love how this post is very very narrow, and very very specific, and about a topic that everyone was mind-killed on in the late aughties, but which very few people are mind-killed on in modern times.
It feels like a calibration exercise!
(Also, I wrote a LOT of words on related issues, and what I think this might be a calibration exercise for …that I’ve edited out since it was a big and important topic, and would have taken a long time to edit into something usefully readable.)
It is safe and easy to say: I appreciate the scholarship and care that was taken to figure things out here, and to highlight how rare it is for people to understand the specific subquestion, and not conflate subquestions with larger nearby issues, and (without doing any original research or even clicking through to read most of the links) I find the conclusion and confidence level reasonably convincing.
On mechanistic psychology priors (given that no smoking guns were found here) the thing I would expect is that Hitchens spent some time thinking that water boarding wasn’t really brutal or terrible torture that should be illegal… (maybe he published something that is hard to find now and felt guilt about that, or maybe he just had private opinions) and then he probably did some research on it and at some point changed his mind in private, and then he might have tried to experience it as a way of creating credibility using a story that would echo in history?
That is, I suspect the direct personal experience didn’t cause the update.
I suspect he intellectually suspected what was probably true, and then gathered personally expensive evidence that confirmed his intellectual suspicions for the sake of how the evidence gathering method would play in stories about his take on the topic.
though → thought
it’s wasn’t → it wasn’t
torture.. → torture… (ellipses have three dots)
it isn’t torture → it is torture
Fixed, thank you.
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