Journalist submits to waterboarding

0 Comments | AFP, July, 2008

NEW YORK (AFP) — British-American writer Christopher Hitchens voluntarily submitted to waterboarding and concluded that the controversial interrogation technique used by the CIA is torture, he said in a magazine article published Wednesday.

Hitchens said in the Vanity Fair article that he contacted members of the US special forces who train soldiers in how to resist torture in order to experience waterboarding, the simulated drowning technique which the Central Intelligence Agency in February acknowledged it used on three top terror suspects.

The journalist and author described how -- at the request of his editors -- he ventured to an unnamed rural location in the southeastern US state of North Carolina where agents put a hood over his head, bound his feet, cuffed...