Who Would JesusTorture?
In an apparent attempt to prove they can keep up with the ER, the TS ran a column by Morton Kondracke that was right up there with O’Reilly at his raving best. The headline calls Democrats Bush haters, and does the usual equating freedom of speech with treason. He goes on to note that Bin Laden is still at large, and worries that the Democrats’ irrational doubting of Bush means planes are aimed at skyscrapers in Keokuk and Long Beach at this moment.
And this guy is the editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capital Hill. No wonder Congress is so screwed up.
But the Democrats, as he points out, have the temerity to ask that only methods of interrogation approved in the Army Field Manual can be used by the CIA. This would make “Waterboarding” (torture by drowning) illegal. Kondracke thinks banning this form of torture is an engraved invitation to Bin Laden to come and kill his wife and kids. His argument, and apparently Nancy Pelosi’s, since she approved waterboarding before, and voted for the “Patriot Act”, is that when it comes to the war on terror, any method of battle is not only justified, but required.
My question is, if waterboarding and other forms of “enhanced interrogation” are OK, where WOULD Kondracke and his ilk draw the line? Would bamboo shoots under the fingernails be fine? Chopsticks in the eardrums? The iron maiden? The rack? And when we’ve done all these things to get the evil SOBs to tell us who their friends are, remind me: how are we BETTER than they are?
Comments
So if I read your first sentence right, Walt, your idea of a good opinion page is one which publishes only certain kinds of opinions?
Posted by: Rich Somerville | December 27, 2007 10:34 AM