Andrew Sullivan has a rather extensive refutation of former Bush speechwriter (and new Washington Post hire) Marc Thiessen’s argument that the physical and psychological abuse inflicted on terror detainees by the Bush Administration were “carried out in a moral way” compatible with the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. It is worth reading Sullivan’s piece in its entirety.

I am not qualified to argue Catholic theology. But I was struck by one of the many arguments Thiessen uses as part of his well-honed debate-style, which depends heavily on knocking down red herrings. (“Our public perception of interrogation is [the television show] ’24,’ ” he says at one point. “Critics have come out and made false accusations, comparing it to the Spanish Inquisition and the Khmer Rouge” etc.)

At the end of the video below, Thiessen justifies the use of waterboarding and other harsh methods like dietary manipulation, sleep deprivation and stress positions by asserting that the captured terrorist Abu Zubaydah told interrogators after the fact that his own abuse was a good thing.

After he was was waterboarded he thanked his interrogators for waterboarding him, and he said, “You must do this for all the brothers.”

According to Thiessen’s unnamed sources, Zubaydah thanked his interrogators for forcing him to the edge of what he could physically and mentally endure, thereby freeing him of his religious obligation to not talk. The logic of this argumentation, as they say in the business, shocks my conscience.