Thomas Harrison called it the "water treatment".

On May 21, 1951, Lt Col Harrison's F-80 jet fighter was shot down over North Korea. Two years later, Harrison returned home to Clovis, New Mexico a broken man.

His Communist captors, he said, "would bend my head back, put a towel over my face and pour water over the towel. I could not breathe. This went on hour after hour, day after day. It was freezing cold. When I would pass out, they would shake me and begin again."

The treatment inflicted on downed airmen like Harrison spurred the Pentagon in the 1950s to study Communist torture. False confessions, it was discovered, were drawn by methods designed to elicit dependency and dread employing water, cold air, forced standing, isolation and humiliation. According to one 1956 CIA-sponsored report [PDF]:

The Communists do not look upon these assaults as 'torture'. Undoubtedly, they use the methods which they do in order to conform, in a typical legalistic manner to overt Communist principles which demand that 'no force or torture be used in extracting information from prisoners'. But these methods do, of course, constitute torture and physical coercion. All of them lead to serious disturbances of many bodily processes.

On 2 October 2002, a group of intelligence officials gathered at Guantanamo to discuss an array of coercive methods to be used on inmates. Earlier that year, President Bush declared that the Geneva conventions do not protect Taliban and al-Qaida suspects in US custody. "After 9/11," as the CIA's then counterterror chief Cofer Black infamously put it, "the gloves came off."

One participant at the October meeting, according to a recently declassified transcript [PDF], asked about a "wet towel" technique. CIA counterterrorism lawyer Jonathan Fredman responded: "If a well-trained individual is used to perform this technique it can feel like you're drowning. The lymphatic system will react as if you are suffocating, but your body will not cease to function." Torture, Fredman added, "is basically subject to perception…. If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong."

After approval by the Department of Justice and the National Security Council's principles committee, which included Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, waterboarding, plus an array of other coercive techniques, was used on at least three terrorism suspects. Senior Democrats, including current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, were briefed on its application.

When these facts surfaced in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal, many rushed to defend use of the waterboard. In 2006, Cheney agreed that "a dunk in water is a no-brainer" to save lives. For Rudy Giuliani, whether or not it is torture "depends on who does it." For others, waterboarding is "like swimming, freestyle, backstroke", in the bizarre words of Republican Senator Kit Bond. Presidential candidate John McCain, himself a Vietnam-era torture survivor, even voted against an amendment seeking to ban CIA authorization of waterboarding.

Now, neoconservative pundit Christopher Hitchens has waded into the debate. In a new article for Vanity Fair, Hitchens - like several other journalists before him - underwent the procedure. "If waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture," noted Hitchens, who lasted roughly 10 seconds under the spout.

Hitchens cites the salient views of Malcolm Nance, a US counter-terrorism consultant who speaks eloquently against its use. "Mr Nance told me that he had heard of someone's being compelled to confess that he was a hermaphrodite," recalled Hitchens, adding: "I later had an awful twinge while wondering if I myself could have been 'dunked' this far."

Still, Hitchens cannot escape the grip of American exceptionalism that has so permeated his work since 9/11. "Any call to indict the United States for torture is … 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," he huffs.

For Hitchens, in America's pitched battle with "tormentors and murderers", the ends justify the means. I disagree. Communist techniques hinged on the infliction of pain elicit bad intelligence and helps fan the flames of hatred against the US. In the case of the "water treatment", poor means corrupt good ends.