Christopher Hitchens: Believe Me, It's Torture(2008)

What more can be added to the debate over U.S. interrogation methods, and whether waterboarding is torture? Try first-hand experience.

Christopher Hitchens: Believe Me, It's Torture is a documentary that captures the moment a celebrated author and polemicist confronted his own convictions. Hitchens had long argued that waterboarding didn't constitute torture—a position he was willing to test firsthand. In May 2007, he submitted to the interrogation technique himself, an experience that shattered his certainty. The encounter forced a dramatic reversal: Hitchens publicly admitted he'd been wrong and that waterboarding is indeed torture. His firsthand account became the basis for a 2008 Vanity Fair essay of the same name, a rare moment of intellectual reckoning from one of the era's most uncompromising voices. The film documents this pivotal confrontation between ideology and physical reality.