Tortured Debate
by digby
Word:
“I never thought I’d live in a country where we would debate whether we should endorse torture as an official policy. Was some information obtained through torture? Probably yeah. Could it have been obtained through more professional methods the intelligence professionals recommended? Almost certainly yes. We could have gotten it sooner and better.”
That’s Thomas Ricks in response to the ever more unhinged torture advocate Liz Cheney.
Steve Benen has the rundown of her chilling appearance on yesterday’s This Week including her dark, portentous claim that Obama’s abandonment of the torture regime means it’s now impossible to gather intelligence about terrorism anymore.
It still jars me to hear people dryly debating this on television. I know that torture have always happened at the American government’s hand and I’m not naive enough to think that we’ve suddenly become more primitive and violent. The history of the United States on that count is not exactly hearts and flowers. But I do not believe that this issue was considered publicly open for debate in recent times until the Cheney regime made it so. Now, there is still some genuflecting to normal morality in that even Liz Cheney still claims that the medieval waterboarding or more recent uses of psychological and pharmacological treatments are not really torture. But it’s a throwaway line delivered perfunctorily as if it’s one of those disclaimers at the end of the Viagra commercials.
That she is still given the platform to insist that torture is necessary keeps the debate alive and I would expect that all presidents reserve the right to employ it if they feel its necessary and will have no trouble making that argument if they have to. It’s no longer taboo. It’s mainstream. After all, President Obama himself used the strange wording “the United States doesn’t torture” instead of “the United States doesn’t torture anymore.”
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