Seeing as how these tactics have been said to have been used to elicit false confessions and/or evaluated by a number of notable military professionals as not reliable, you'd think this conversation could be wrapped up in short order.
Let's review the two key points again:
a) We called these same tactics torture when our enemies did them.
b) Our enemies used them to extract confessions which were likely to be, known to be, or intentionally elicited as false confessions.
Do we really need to argue more beyond those two points?
Apparently we do as long as Dick Cheney's grip on the Dark Side stays as strong as it is. He's more Dick now, than man... twisted and evil.
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The thing that gets me about all this recent media hooplah surrounding waterboarding or "torture" as we are more appropriately referring to it now, is that this isn't a new revelation.
But all of a sudden Dick Cheney can't keep his freakin' mouth shut on his PR campaign to keep himself and W out of jail. And all of a sudden we are calling a spade a spade. I say Cheney keeps it up and Obama is going to have to "look into it" and that twisted and evil half machine is likely to end up in jail.
I can't wait.
Hmm... some of us are calling a spade a spade. Seems as many of us as ever (and by us I mean MSM) are calling a spade enhanced interrogation as ever.
And I'm getting the feeling that Cheney's gonna have to waterboard Obama personally before he's going to do "look into it." Seriously, he's twisted almost out of his way to avoid looking into it, instead of "looking forward". As someone said, though, all crimes are by definition in the past, and that's a bullshit excuse. Obama isn't willing to spend his political capital on it -- understandable -- but also means we're post hoc legitimizing what B & C did. Slate's Lithwick and Sands clled this one wrong:
"The answer to that question takes you to a very different place when the act is torture, as Crawford says it is. Under the 1984 Torture Convention, its 146 state parties (including the United States) are under an obligation to "ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law." These states must take any person alleged to have committed torture (or been complicit or participated in an act of torture) who is present in their territories into custody. The convention allows no exceptions, as Sen. Pinochet discovered in 1998. The state party to the Torture Convention must then submit the case to its competent authorities for prosecution or extradition for prosecution in another country.
The former chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces and general counsel for the Department of the Army has spoken. Her clear words have been picked up around the world. And that takes the prospects of accountability and criminal investigation onto another level. For the Obama administration, the door to the do-nothing option is now closed. That is why today may come to be seen as the turning point."Written Jan. 14, 2009
Sigh.
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