The Nonlinear Library LW - Did Christopher Hitchens change his mind about waterboarding? by Isaac King
Sep 15, 2024
10:37
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Did Christopher Hitchens change his mind about waterboarding?, published by Isaac King on September 15, 2024 on LessWrong.
There's a popular story that goes like this: Christopher Hitchens used to be in favor of the US waterboarding terrorists because he though it's wasn't bad enough to be torture.. Then he had it tried on himself, and changed his mind, coming to believe it isn't torture.
(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 t...
There's a popular story that goes like this: Christopher Hitchens used to be in favor of the US waterboarding terrorists because he though it's wasn't bad enough to be torture.. Then he had it tried on himself, and changed his mind, coming to believe it isn't torture.
(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 t...