There's a common narrative online that Christopher Hitchens was a defender of the US waterboarding terrorists and/or believed it was not a form of torture, until he tried it himself and changed his mind.

But I can't find any evidence that he actually believed this prior to his experiment. He did support the war on terror, and he did write things that vaguely implied some nonzero level of support for the US using coercive methods to extract information from people, but I can find nothing where he clearly states anything like "I don't think waterboarding is torture" or "I oppose pulling people's teeth out with pliers but am ok with waterboarding them" or similar. The closest he came is once describing waterboarding as "rough interrogation", but that's not mutually exclusive with torture; in fact I'd say that most people would consider torture to be some of the roughest interrogation there is.

Resolves YES if anyone provides a source for this claim, or otherwise convinces me that it's true. Note that him simply being in favor of waterboarding in a sufficiently serious "ticking bomb" situation is not sufficient, since he might also be in favor of other forms of torture and not see waterboarding as any different. But if he said something like "waterboarding is acceptable in a ticking bomb situation, but cutting someone with a knife is never acceptable", that would count.