For most of us, "water-boarding" is something we only read about - with revulsion or grim resignation, depending on our point of view.

Not Christopher Hitchens.

In the latest issue of Vanity Fair, Hitchens recounts his own horrifying experiment with water-boarding. He persuaded a team of military trainers - those who prepare American combatants to resist interrogation techniques that our enemies might employ - to subject him to water-boarding so he could write about it. It's the sort of first-person account we don't often get. (Accused terrorists, after all, rarely get writing contracts from national magazines.) And it's the sort of account that will leave few readers with any doubt that water-boarding is torture, and torture is un-American.

Here is a portion of his description of the experience:

"On top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and - as you might expect - inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don't want to tell you how little time I lasted."

Water-boarding, Hitchens convincingly points out, isn't the simulation of drowning. It is drowning, albeit under controlled conditions. It is so extreme that its victims crack quickly - ready to fess up to crimes real . . . or imagined. The more it is employed by Americans, the more likely that it will be employed against Americans, too.

Remember when Americans were unequivocally the good guys? A line, as Hitchens makes distressingly clear, has now been crossed.