Torture, it is...

Hitchens penned an interesting piece of journalism in the August Vanity Fair, discussing his own experience being waterboarded. His writing is excellent as ever, with some interesting conclusions:

I fought down the first, and some of the second, wave of nausea and terror but soon found that I was an abject prisoner of my gag reflex. The interrogators would hardly have had time to ask me any questions, and I knew that I would quite readily have agreed to supply any answer.

The truly interesting part of this article is that Hitchens doesn't apply his conclusion that waterboarding is torture to the bigger issue of what this means for America and its image. George Packer takes up this idiosynchrosy in his work in the July 3rd New Yorker.