Hitchens undergoes "waterboarding", admits it's torture

Here's a proper bit of journalism - following his earlier claim that "waterboarding" doesn't amount to torture, but rather "extreme interrogation", New Humanist honorary associate Christopher Hitchens agreed to let some scary-looking ex-special forces guys in balaclavas try it out on him for his latest Vanity Fair assignment.

The video's up on the VF website, as is Hitchens' article on the experience. As you'll see he doesn't last very long, and he now admits that waterboarding is most certainly a form of torture.

For more on America's continuing use of torture in the "war on terror", read Stan Cohen's column from our January issue.