The Hoover Tower, as well as the Institution of the same name, grace the beautiful Stanford University campus like festering zits. And extending what former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura said about Dick Cheney:

"I'll put it to you this way, you give me a water board, Marc Thiessen, and one hour, and I'll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders."

Thiessen's Paleolithic-era views on torture are a disgrace to any campus, and he entirely (conveniently?) misses the point of Hitchens' experiment.

1) No, Thiessen, you dimwit. Hitchens subjected himself to waterboarding as a scientific test. He had NO IDEA WHATSOEVER of how it would feel to be waterboarded -- along with 99.99% of Earth's inhabitants.

2) The excruciating pain of getting a tooth pulled by a pair of pliers, on the other hand, doesn't require much imagination, nor does having one's fingernails pulled out. The same goes for electric shock.

3) How else could Hitchens gain a factual basis for comparison -- if he was truly interested in the question of whether or not waterboarding is torture -- if he didn't know what it felt like?

Thiessen's conclusion that waterboarding isn't "torture" merely because Christopher Hitchens wanted some firsthand evidence -- is nothing short of idiotic. I have little doubt that people have been mentally damaged and slain by waterboarding "experts" over the last decade.