some say this, some say that...

I missed this at the time: Christopher Hitchens gets John Gray’s new volume of essays pulped and amended:

Hitchens was concerned about a line in the introduction to Gray's new essay collection that suggested that after he briefly experienced the torture technique of waterboarding, in which water is poured repeatedly over a prisoner's face, he defended the practice as part of the global struggle against Islamic fundamentalism.

After learning of his objections, Penguin admitted that the line was a mistake and that Hitchens has been consistently opposed to torture. "John made a mistake, Christopher picked it up, we fixed it and John is embarrassed he made a wrong assumption and I am embarrassed not to have picked it up," said the book's editor Simon Winder. The book, Gray's Anatomy, is now being reprinted minus the offending line, ready for publication by Penguin imprint Allen Lane on 2 April.

via. As I recall that essay he toyed with supporting torture – making out an extensive case for it in the voice of an advocate - but then came down against. The sleazy bit here was granting advocates of torture equal representation in the first place, as though it was an issue that needed to be resolved rather than something that needed to be condemned in the first place. If the discussion had been of paedophilia and he’d structured it as “child rape – for or against” before coming down as an anti, he wouldn’t have got away with that so easily.

It’s certainly true that Gray was sloppy (and that was the basic problem with Black Mass – it was a sloppy book) but I’m not sure that Hitchens position on torture could be described as “consistent opposition.” Take that famous qualified endorsement of Saddam’s regime from the 1970s:

Dining with an old man on a houseboat moored in the Tigris. I discovered that he inadvertently embodied the history of modern Iraq. He had been imprisoned in 1941 for opposing the British, again in 1959 for hostility to Kassem’s pro-Russian line and finally in 1969 by the present regime. The last of these had, he said, been easily the worst. He was personally interrogated by Nadim Kzar, then head of the secret police and since executed for his crimes. There had been torture and brutality of a far worse sort than his previous incarcerations. And yet he declared that he thought the present government the best Iraqi Administration he had seen. Why? ‘Because it has made us strong and respected.’ There seems no getting round this point. From the festeringly poor and politically dependent nation of a generation ago, Iraq has become a power in every sense — military, economic and ideological.

Now he didn’t actually recommend Saddam here, or endorse Saddam’s torturers: he had their victim do both and then acquiesced to his conclusions (“there’s no getting round this point”). It’s a classic way of endorsing something you don’t want to leave your own fingerprints on – get the victim to do it. In the Vanity Fair piece, meanwhile, he describes the advocates of waterboarding as a “highly honourable group” and declares that “he would not trust anyone who doesn’t understand their arguments. From both pieces we can draw the conclusion that while Hitchens himself doesn’t support torture, he has a certain tenderness for torturers and for torturing governments, provided he thinks they’re on the right side.