It seems that our hated enemy, the Hitch-beast, has been roaring loudly about a throwaway line in an upcoming book by the British writer and philosopher John Gray. From The Times:

Gray has a book out next month, Gray’s Anatomy, which includes a chapter on torture. He mentions that Hitchens endured Guantanamo-style waterboarding – where water is continually poured over a prisoner’s face – as part of his research into the same subject. “Hitchens – a notable partisan of Enlightenment – defends [torture] as part of the global struggle to defend Enlightenment values against Islamist fundamentalism,” says Gray. Hitchens is furious at the accusation that he favours torture. “This is a direct falsification of my views,” he splutters. Light the blue touch paper and retire.

And it appears his blustering has successfully managed to get Gray and his publisher to back off:

An objection from Christopher Hitchens has forced Penguin to pulp a forthcoming book by philosopher John Gray.

Hitchens was concerned about a line in the introduction to Gray's new essay collection that suggested that after he briefly experienced the torture technique of waterboarding, in which water is poured repeatedly over a prisoner's face, he defended the practice as part of the global struggle against Islamic fundamentalism. After learning of his objections, Penguin admitted that the line was a mistake and that Hitchens has been consistently opposed to torture.

"John made a mistake, Christopher picked it up, we fixed it and John is embarrassed he made a wrong assumption and I am embarrassed not to have picked it up," said the book's editor Simon Winder.

The book, Gray's Anatomy, is now being reprinted minus the offending line, ready for publication by Penguin imprint Allen Lane on 2 April.

Gray is a philosopher and author. His previous books include Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, Straw Dogs, and Al-Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern.

But this at once raises the question: has Hitchens really been "consistently opposed to torture" as it is claimed?

Basically, the short answer is no.

Chris' criticism of the Bush Administration's systematic use of torture was conspicuous by its absence during the vast majority of Dubya's time in office, and only in twilight of Bush II's reign did Chris decide to start grandstanding about it in a pathetic and transparent attempt to mitigate some of the damage that he has done to his reputation after two long terms of squalid and shameful apologetics for the Reactionary Right.

Hitchens spent most of the Bush Administration straddling the issue when he actually said anything at all, but sometimes he even outright supported it in practice, making all sorts of disingenuous excuses for it in the process. Aside from simply canvassing for the election of an Administration that was obviously engaging in torture and flagrantly ripping up the Geneva Conventions and other articles of international law, Chris wrote, for instance, a September 2005 piece for The Weekly Standard, entitled "A War To Be Proud Of." He no doubt expects us to have tossed this into the memory hole, but who can forget Hitchens' sophistic opening to that article when we wrote:

LET ME BEGIN WITH A simple sentence that, even as I write it, appears less than Swiftian in the modesty of its proposal: "Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad."

I could undertake to defend that statement against any member of Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, and I know in advance that none of them could challenge it, let alone negate it. Before March 2003, Abu Ghraib was an abattoir, a torture chamber, and a concentration camp. Now, and not without reason, it is an international byword for Yankee imperialism and sadism. Yet the improvement is still, unarguably, the difference between night and day. How is it possible that the advocates of a post-Saddam Iraq have been placed on the defensive in this manner? And where should one begin?

This is a clear cut and incontrovertible case of Chris defending what was going on at Abu Ghraib, namely torture (which he even subtly concedes within this excerpt while nevertheless condoning it). There's simply no denying that he's defending torture here when he even goes to the extent of explicitly stating that he's on the side of those defending Abu Ghraib. "How is it possible that the advocates of a post-Saddam Iraq have been placed on the defensive in this manner?" he laments. This would be like some Soviet commissar earnestly insisting that he is against torture and for human rights, while at the same time denouncing critics of the Gulags.

Even today, it's not clear that Hitchens is opposed to torture. Maybe I've missed something, but he hasn't clearly come out against extraordinary rendition, which is, as we all know by now, just a euphemism in the imperial lexicon for torture. I've never seen a word from him on the CIA's secret prisons and the "black sites" it currently operates throughout the world. He's not calling for Bagram Air Base to be closed down due to the illegal and unconscionable abuse of its prisoners. And, while I suppose this is not supporting torture per se, he makes an awfully disgraceful case that the Bush Administration is not to blame for torture, but that they were forced to do all this because of the pressure from the American public.

So I think it's fair to say that on the whole John Gray's charge that Hitchens supports torture, which he now claims was an accident, turns out to be rather serendipitous on his part. A pity he has retracted the charge.