Tagged: torture
Did torture work?
Two essential reads: 1) Adam Serwer takes on the Washington Post; 2) Peter Bergen takes on Dick Cheney.
If I Were a Fan of Dick Cheney…
I wouldn’t be so quick to claim that yesterday’s document dump in any way vindicates Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (or, as the rest of the world calls them, Torture). In fact, if I were a...
Was it worth it?
As I understand it, nobody suggests that torture is an ideal policy option. Most people who defend the Bush Administration argue that the unique threat of international terrorism justifies the use of certain otherwise-reprehensible...
Slippery Slopes
Andrew Sullivan’s dissection of one Boston cop’s overtly racist response to the Gates arrest is worth reading in full, but this part caught my eye: And the more you read, the more you realize...
This is your justification?
National Review‘s best argument for “enhanced interrogation” now hinges on the threat posed by . . . Jose Padilla? So we’ve gone from defending torture on the grounds of a ticking time bomb scenario...
it doesn’t matter how horrific they are…
Obama needs to release the photos, even if they do show pictures of the rape of detainees. Indeed, that makes it all the more necessary.
Torture vs. Steroids
A cogent point from the Minnesota Timberwolves’ Mark Madsen: When the congressional hearing of Jose Canseco vs. other MLB players created questions about steroid use, Congress acted quickly and decisively and spent the next...
Next Up…
…Rush? Cheney? Levin? Beck? O’Reilly? Or is the Mancow the only one with the stones not only to actually be waterboarded, but more importantly, to admit that it’s torture. h/t Yglesias
a quote for when it’s about to rain outside…
Pelosi-gate, in a nutshell: What did one member of the minority party know about the majority party’s illegal war crimes and when did she know it? ~ The Anonymous Liberal
reductio ad absurdum
This is just nonsense. I swear, as hapless as the Democrats may be, every time John Boehner opens his mouth I realize just how much more pathetic the Republicans are. In the midst of...
secrets and substance
“So if the Democrats want a truth commission, and the Republicans and Dick Cheney want a truth commission, why can’t we order up a double order of truth commission? Am I missing something here?” ...
torture and terror
“The worst thing in the world is to try to sleep and not to.” ~F. Scott Fitzgerald Sleep deprivation, as Andrew notes, “can sound deceptively banal” compared to other torture techniques. Of course, keeping...
An Exceptionally Moral United States
I have a confession to make. Despite all my criticisms of waterboarding, American foreign policy interventionism, and a whole host of other aspects of the modern federal government, not to mention my refusal to...
Look Back in Anger
I suspect the debate over torture, atomic weaponry, and morality is rapidly reaching the point of diminishing returns, but I did want to say one last thing on the subject before moving on. For...
a quote for the afternoon
“I would not take this thing, if it lay by the highway. Not were Minas Tirith falling in ruin and I alone could save her, so, using the weapon of the Dark Lord for...
quote for the morning
Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb. . . . The second exception to the no-torture rule is the extraction of information from a high-value...
War Crimes, Then and Now
In the course of a very thorough fisking of Michael Goldfarb’s latest attempt to justify torture, Julian Sanchez makes the rather banal observation that failure to prosecute war crimes in World War II doesn’t...
thoughts on a truth commission
Briefly, I think it’s fair that a lot of different opinions are being floated by various anti-torture types regarding prosecutions, truth commissions, etc….
