Jeff Sharlet contemplates Hitch's last essay in Mortality, on the after-effects of his "simulated" waterboarding for Vanity Fair:
The last coherent words of the book are dedicated to his ongoing "post-torture stress," bad enough in the form of a phantom panic of asphyxiation— "a smothering or choked nightmare sensation"—and much worse when elicited by tube feeding. The tube is not torture, but the body is neither rational nor subject to the mind’s attempts at logic. "I don’t have a body," Hitchens learns, "I am a body." Of course, such a truth ought to be basic to a rationalist—but for Hitchens, as for most of us, it needed to be learned. In Hitchens’s experience, suffering—unchosen, unstoppable—proved the most effective teacher; and its lesson, like the substance of prayer, becomes a kind of story: There is a protagonist, he is blind, then he sees. That he sees too late allows for a tragic variation; that it would have made no difference had he seen earlier allows for a comic one.
The Dish 