THE TORTURE DEBATE ("Republicans have defined deviancy down")

[ProSense]

THE TORTURE DEBATE in Congress--I never expected to write such words--is as surreal to me as watching the collapse of the Twin Towers. If the Democrats are able to take control of at least one chamber in November, then surely the President's pro-torture bill will be viewed in hindsight as the nadir of the Bush presidency. If not, how much lower can things go?

I am beyond being able to assess the political implications, one way or the other, of this spectacle. Regardless of which version of the bill finally passes, this debate is a black mark on the soul of the nation. Of course passage of a pro-torture bill will diminish U.S. standing internationally and jeopardize the safety and well-being of U.S. servicemen in future engagements. But merely having this debate has already accomplished that. Does anyone honestly believe that if Congress rebuffs the President in every respect that the rule of law and the inviolability of human rights will have been vindicated? Of course not.

The Republicans have defined deviancy down for the whole world, including every two-bit dictator and wild-eyed terrorist.

In Slate, Dahlia Lithwick writes of the pro-torture presidency:

(L)egal obfuscation is enormously attractive to President Bush. It means all but the most highly credentialed law professors and government lawyers are constantly confused; it means subsequent legal claims that interrogators "did not know that the practices were unlawful" have real credibility. And perhaps, most importantly to this White House, it obscures where things have gone awry up and down the chain of command. One possibility, then, is that all these eleventh-hour redefinitions of torture are presidential attempts to "afford brutality the cloak of law," in the words of Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. But increasingly, it seems clear that its real purpose is simply to brutalize the law.

And to brutalize people.

Only the weak, scared, and evil torture. Those who order and sanction torture, but leave the dirty work to others, are an order of magnitude more culpable morally. (A special place is reserved for the lawyers who give legal cover for such orders.) In their fear and their weakness and their smallness, the President and those around him stepped over the line. To do so in the heated days after 9/11 is understandable to a point, though not justifiable. Yet they persisted, first in saying that they did not step over the line and now in seeking to redraw the line. So which is it?

They are descending from the morally reprehensible to the morally cowardly.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/009819.php

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. That anyone in this country is even debating whether to torture

prisoners is absolutely mind-boggling. Could we have imagined, as recently as six years ago, that the government of the United States would ever even contemplate the possibility that under some circumstances it would be permissible, even advisable, to torture captives in secret prisons? When I was growing up, our sworn enemy was the Soviet Union, and one of the reasons we were told they were so terrible was that they imprisoned people following show trials or no trials at all, and then abused them for indefinite periods in secret prisons. This, we were told, was something we could never possibly do because we were a democracy and we had a constitution that prevented such things from ever occurring. And yet, now we find our government has been doing exactly that which we deplored when other governments did it; and worse, they are now demanding that these practices be made retroactively legal.

Why? Because we need to imprison and torture suspected terrorists to prevent them from striking us again? Bullshit. We managed to defeat Nazi Germany, which posed the greatest direct and immediate threat in our entire history, without torturing German POWs. Why is it so essential to our security that we do these terrible, immoral things now? So Bush can look really, really tough to his knuckle-dragging base in order to compensate for the fact that the US got its ass handed to it by a bunch of pajama-wearing guerrilas in Vietnam and later got kicked in the nuts by 19 guys with box cutters?

This leads to the question, which might be unanswerable, of why anyone would want to torture anybody, since it's generally acepted that information gained through torture or coercion tends to be unreliable. If there is an answer, it most likely lies in the field of abnormal psychology.

It's obvious why Bush wants torture to be declared legal retroactively: because if the Democrats take control of the government there will be investigations and well-deserved prosecutions. Bush and his stooges belong in the dock at The Hague. And he won't be able to persuade the black ops people who have been doing this to keep doing it if they believe they might be prosecuted.

But it still just blows me away that my country's government should even be having this discussion in the first place. They have crossed a line that should never have been crossed, or even contemplated.

[Marrak]

2. Toture boy...

not justifiable....
<>

[winston61]

3. The next time I have to listen to

one of these Texas republican assholes talk to me about honor and decency I think I will puke on them. Kiss my ass, torture monkey boy!