Warning : This Amnesty International advertisement about torturing by waterboarding may be too upsetting for some of our readers.

Christopher Hitchens is the curmudgeonly self-described polemicist and intellectual that most recently has been stationed at Slate.com. From his cyber column, he's been known to throw atheist molotovs to the theocrats of the American right wing and verbal judo blows to two of his most detested foes, the Clintons.

Yet even though he's no friend of the extreme right, he's been a defender of George Bush's foreign policy and a rabid apologist for the invasion of Iraq. Not of Abu Ghraib or torture techniques, but certainly for the war.

Which is why I find it fascinating (although not shocking given his propensity for pulling self-promoting stunts) that when asked by Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter if he'd like to be tortured with waterboarding by former military Special Forces, he gladly accepted :

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--or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The "board" is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and--as you might expect--inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don't want to tell you how little time I lasted.

The men and women who show them their techniques for resisting waterboarding were training in the art of SERE, Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. Their lessons they learned in waterboarding were for survival. The didn't learn waterboarding so they could torture enemy combatants. They were taught waterboarding so they could survive it in the event they became prisoners of war.

Hitchens may be fool to support the Iraq War but he is not an unethical fool. His article is an argument for respecting the Geneva Convention and for the most basic respect for human rights even in the middle of a terrible war.

I have a lot of problems with a lot of what Hitchens writes but it's when he writes articles like this one that he earns my respect.