Clarification on the Waterboard

Last month, I wrote a small piece for the Guardian on Christopher Hitchens' much ballyhooed waterboard experience for Vanity Fair. While he conceded it was torture and cited the salient views of Malcolm Nance-- he didn't quite repudiate its use either. Hitchens, adopting the view of torture proponents, noted:

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.

That all said, I was pleasantly impressed with a recent interview Hitchens' conducted on this topic. In it, he drops the viewpoint of torturers and clearly states waterboarding should be discontinued. "If needs must, what wouldn't you justify?", he says. Definitely a step in the right direction.