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" I think it&amp;#039;s damned open-minded of The Washington Post to turn over its editorial space every now and then to an out-and-out sadist. No, really, it&amp;#039;s this kind of commitment to an expansive reading of the First Amendment that may be the saving of us all in this new media age. Don&amp;#039;t stop there. Launch this stuff on several &amp;quot;platforms,&amp;quot; as the consultants put it these days. Let the guy make snuff films. There&amp;#039;s not a lot of point in trying to pick the half-digested niblets out of this moral dung-heap, although I do like the moment early on when Thiessen seems to be arguing that waterboarding may not be not necessarily be torture \u2014 &amp;quot;It would be illegal for a foreign adversary to waterboard a U.S. soldier, even if the technique did not amount to torture.&amp;quot;\u2014 even if practiced on uniformed military personnel of the United States. (It would be illegal, though, so watch it.) Actual soldiers, and not the think-tank commandos he goes to dinner with on the weekends, must adore his ability to make so measured a moral choice. Also, there&amp;#039;s this, well, tortured logic: &amp;quot;When an American soldier is captured and taken off the battlefield, he has been effectively disarmed and rendered unable to cause harm to the enemy.&amp;quot; My understanding, from years of talking to actual soldiers, is that a soldier is required to take all measures he can to continue to harm the enemy and the enemy&amp;#039;s war efforts. (Occasionally, it should be noted, this has resulted in the captured soldier&amp;#039;s being interrogated in an enhanced way.) Actual soldiers, and not the Fourth Mounted Honorarium Brigade that he drinks with on holidays, must think this guy is a riot. He got caught lying about the effectiveness of all of this in his meticulously documented book by a better reporter than I am, or he&amp;#039;ll ever be, so it&amp;#039;s hardly necessary to emphasize that he&amp;#039;s being truthless about that part all over again, although it ought to matter to the Post more than it apparently does. But the most important thing to remember is that the big brave man making the big brave argument served the previous incompetent administration as a  speechwriter. That&amp;#039;s whose opinion The Washington Post is asking us to take seriously on the subject of reversing a centuries-old military policy, and a commitment that this country made at a time after several million of our actual uniformed soldiers had died to stop nations whose entire political structures were built on the kind of savagery that he so glibly shares with the rest of us. A fking speechwriter. And people wonder how Michael Brown got his job. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a11673/marc-theissen-waterboarding-6562796/>