Hitchens, waterboarding, and torture

So, as any consumer -- whatever his or her views -- of social and political commentary knows, Christopher Hitchens can be very frustrating.  He can be (I think) right on, he can be horribly, horribly wrong.  Here, at First Things, Ryan Anderson has posted an excerpt from Hitchens's recent essay waterboarding, specifically, his own experience of being waterboarded.

I've expressed, on this and other blogs, both my unreserved assent to the proposition that "torture" is immoral, and my frustration with what I see as the tendency, in some quarters, to skate too quickly past (what seems to me to be) the hard issue of identifying what, exactly, we are talking about.  That said, Hitchens is confident, anyway, that we *are* talking about waterboarding.  He states fairly the other view:

The team who agreed to give me a hard time in the woods of North Carolina belong to a highly honorable group. This group regards itself as out on the front line in defense of a society that is too spoiled and too ungrateful to appreciate those solid, underpaid volunteers who guard us while we sleep. These heroes stay on the ramparts at all hours and in all weather, and if they make a mistake they may be arraigned in order to scratch some domestic political itch. Faced with appalling enemies who make horror videos of torture and beheadings, they feel that they are the ones who confront denunciation in our press, and possible prosecution. As they have just tried to demonstrate to me, a man who has been waterboarded may well emerge from the experience a bit shaky, but he is in a mood to surrender the relevant information and is unmarked and undamaged and indeed ready for another bout in quite a short time. When contrasted to actual torture, waterboarding is more like foreplay. No thumbscrew, no pincers, no electrodes, no rack. Can one say this of those who have been captured by the tormentors and murderers of (say) Daniel Pearl? On this analysis, any call to indict the United States for torture is therefore a lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilization and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out, and ultimately to bring it down. I myself do not trust anybody who does not clearly understand this viewpoint.

Still, he concludes:

I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

Worth a read, I think.  (Even if he is way-wrong when it comes to Mother Teresa, God, and the like.)