Christopher Hitchens was voluntarily waterboarded recently. No, this wasn't an episode of Circus of the Neocons. As a fan of the Iraq carnage and supporter of all violations of the Constitution and international law falling under the Global War on Terror umbrella, he decided to see for himself whether the water-board "interrogation technique" is indeed torture.
Never mind that waterboarding has been torture since the Spanish Inquisition; the intrepid Orwell wannabe was on the case. One can almost picture Hitchens boasting at a pub, "It can't be that bad& it's just dunking heads under water! Blimey, we did that to the frosh back at Oxford!"
I once admired Hitchens. Six months before the towers fell in New York, I went to the Hickory Stick Bookshop in Washington, Conn., to meet him. He was at the shop for two reasons. One, to sign copies of his latest book about Henry Kissinger. Two, he had been invited to a dinner party to which Kissinger, who lived nearby, had also been invited. The possibility of a confrontation between these two was too good to pass up. So I drove through the sun-kissed May countryside in eager anticipation (my account, written for Gadfly, is at http://www.gadflyonline.com/lastweek/henry.html).
At the time, I was in Hitchens' good graces because I'd written a piece about him for the Advocate, and we'd had a long, amiable phone conversation. He was not yet on board the Bush Express. He even made a few interesting observations about the man, including, "Notice how often the phrase 'peaceful transition of power' is being used to describe the Bush ascendancy. They try to brush your patriotic G-spot with this phrase. But why do they keep telling you this?" he asked, then answered his own query: "They want to ventriloquize you. If it were a peaceful transition of power, it ought not to be constantly brought to our attention."
Afterwards, I spoke with Hitchens outside the shop while he smoked an endless number of cigarettes and swilled his cup of& whatever.
But that was 100,000 cigarettes and no telling how many drinks ago. He has not only undergone a physical transformation since then, he now embraces the Bush Doctrine and even some Kissinger-esque realpolitik. He takes actual visceral joy at the war in Iraq, calling it "a pleasure." Of the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths in Iraq, Hitchens—the man who, in his book about Kissinger, all but convicted the Secretary of State of "war crimes"—says blithely that "the tree of liberty is being watered in the traditional manner." (With blood, that is, in case you don't get the Jeffersonian allusion.) He conflated anyone who expressed opposition to the war in Iraq as being "pro-Saddam."
The final indication of Hitchens' complete change is that, according to a profile in last Sunday's Times magazine, Rush Limbaugh calls him his favorite writer. But here's the rub: we were right. He (and Limbaugh, Bush and Kissinger) were profoundly, unalterably wrong on everything since 9/11.
If Hitchens lives long enough, given his extremist whims—once a Trotskyist and now a neocon and scourge of anyone who is not, like him, an avowed atheist—I would not be surprised if he were to undergo a religious conversion. Like Evelyn Waugh—whom he more resembles than his hero Orwell—Hitchens will then be the most devout and unbending of religious zealots, like the jihadists with whom he is now at war. At that point, anyone who does not convert to his religion will be, as now, banished to Hitchens' choice of hells.
Oh, by the way. Hitchens did discover that waterboarding is indeed torture.
For what that's worth.
