No Straw Men

Five weeks ago, my boss casually mentioned that he was giving me until August 5 to attract 10,000 fans to the Vanity Fair Facebook page. It was an onerous and epic assignment, and I responded to it the way any sensible person would.

This is the guy who took Arnold from less than a sure thing to a 20-point winner in 2006, who ran the confirmation processes for Justices Roberts and Alito, and and who was the Bush operative most responsible for defining John Kerry.

(1) There is too much noise on FriendFeed. (2) I have no desire to recreate my Twitter network on FriendFeed. (3) For whatever reason I don’t like the FriendFeed user experience.

How does it feel to be “aggressively interrogated”? Christopher Hitchens found out for himself, submitting to a brutal waterboarding session in an effort to understand the human cost of America’s use of harsh tactics at Guantánamo and elsewhere.

The author undergoes the controversial drowning technique, at the hands of men who once trained American soldiers to resist—not inflict—it.