Recently Hitchens, who I generally consider a mercantile cretin, wrote a credible enough article on the water torture*, and specified at one point that he was not asthmatic.

As a severe asthmatic with various severe allergies causing anaphylaxis, I’ve got one major thing to add to the discussion - something that has yet to come from anyone who has undergone simulated water torture, and rightly so, because the simulation leaves the boundaries of safety if lung conditions are involved. It is the experience of air hunger.

Just like most allergies take a second encounter to fully kick in - and just like most moral depravities (whether universal (e.g. murder) or cultural (e.g. porcophagy) seem only to produce memorable sensation the second time around, it takes us a few goes with air hunger to understand it well. The set of sensations surrounding air hunger are difficult to describe regardless - because they operate at a level well beneath human consciousness. Air hunger produces a sensation of morbidity, the feeling from something beneath your brain, your nerves, and even your organs that you are going to die.

The basic problem behind air hunger precedes sapience, precedes sentience, precedes sex, precedes organs and tissues and even eukaryota. It is the closest anything about the human experience ever gets to primal - and, I can say from experience, rages on all the worse after fine motor control, touch, hearing, taste, and the sensation of temperature - even consciousness - have evaporated.

The reason water torture is so uniquely terrifying is that it involves showing the very cells of the body their own mortality, and responding to it takes such a high priority that the conscious mind labors against its aftershocks in futility. This is something that someone who has been through a single water torture, or a fairly brief series of them, does not have necessarily to deal with.

In psychological and psychiatric terms, the water torture is a barbaric, violent, and permanent abuse - worse than beatings, dismemberment, or rape. Even watching - to say nothing of making - a man drown is grotesque enough; that people anywhere close to power would bless in clean conscience the repeated infliction of air hunger for some horrific parody of interrogation is one of the more demoralizing revelations of my lifetime.

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*While ‘waterboarding’ is now well-understood enough that its euphemistic power is fleeing, and ‘the water cure’ has been used in a purely pejorative sense for the last half century, it seems glib to the point of blasphemy to use either.