Too bad many Republicans, including McCain, still don’t.

Why does McCain not get it? This was one of the issues that a lot of the “not getting it” republicans challenged him on during the primary. I have always heard McCain say waterboarding is torture and that it should be prohibited. Where is your evidence on the contrary?

Hitch also says this about the SEER members who carried out the technique:

Faced with appalling enemies who make horror videos of torture and beheadings, they feel that they are the ones who confront denunciation in our press, and possible prosecution. As they have just tried to demonstrate to me, a man who has been waterboarded may well emerge from the experience a bit shaky, but he is in a mood to surrender the relevant information and is unmarked and undamaged and indeed ready for another bout in quite a short time. When contrasted to actual torture, waterboarding is more like foreplay. No thumbscrew, no pincers, no electrodes, no rack. Can one say this of those who have been captured by the tormentors and murderers of (say) Daniel Pearl? On this analysis, any call to indict the United States for torture is therefore a lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilization and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out, and ultimately to bring it down. I myself do not trust anybody who does not clearly understand this viewpoint.

So he seems to at least have some sympathy to the other side of the argument as well, and acknowledges that it is a more nuanced issue than many people make it out to be.