Christopher Hitchens got waterboarded (if that is the verb) for Vanity Fair last year, to see first-hand whether or not it was torture. He concluded that if waterboarding did not constitute torture, there is no such thing as torture. The world didn't erupt with one voice of adulation at his piece, but it was generally accepted that he didn't do it to be macho. His was a serious exploration of the constitutional and moral implications of forcing a wet rag into a prisoner's mouth to persuade him that he is drowning. And that is at the centre of self-imposed waterboarding, for journalistic or other research purposes - it has to be serious, otherwise it is obscene.
There has been a whole spate of voluntary waterboardings lately whose sincerity, acuity and purpose are more debatable. The journalist Kaj Larsen paid some interrogators $800 to torture him in this manner: his conclusions were the same as Hitchens' - it was uniquely unpleasant, and he would have told his torturers anything to get them to stop. But there was a lot of joshing around at the start of his video for cable channel Current TV (tinyurl.com/2cqg3e) about how he had bargained the waterboarders down from $1,000, and how he would probably regret that in about five minutes, and the result was all a bit Big Boy's Book of Super Adventure. The tone was disrespectful to the real prisoners who have no reason to believe that they won't be killed - it's a torture of expectation, as much as anything else.
But at least Larsen was serious. He explored the ground widely, interviewing Harvard professors and similar. Richard Armitage, an actor, went through it for the less serious purpose of an episode of Spooks. It's really unpleasant, he concurred. "I only lasted five to 10 seconds, and the sound of my voice crying out to stop isn't me acting." Pal, that's nice that you're not showing off but this is all wrong and despicable: it's like locking yourself and 10 friends into a loo on a commuter train, to see what it would be like on the train to Auschwitz. If you can make it stop whenever you like, you're learning nothing and kicking people in the face while you're at it.