I thought "not that there's anything wrong with that" was a South Park quote which nobody used seriously. A couple of nights ago I called my real estate agent regarding signing papers regarding the property he is selling for us, and he told me he had gone to Target to buy some groceries. My immediate reaction was to think that was "gay" in the high school sense, which has nothing at all to do with the fact that he lives with a man almost pretty as he is. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I wish we'd just go with a straight program of sodium pentathol. It's as effective as any coerced questioning, and it doesn't hurt anybody. Just truth serum. No stress positions or waterboarding or any of that bullshit. If we did this one thing it would essentially end this debate. Think about it.

yours/
peter.

Peter,

I don't know enough about the emotional/physical effects (or efficacy) of sodium pentathol to hold an informed opinion. Although my first instinct is to reply, "Yes, but..."

Regarding any kind of coercion, I always retreat to the same position: We need to abolish it, unreservedly. If, in the unlikely case, we ever do run into the Ticking Timebomb Scenario, then we have an obvious exception - but it's an exception the law should feel free to ignore.

Because if there really is a ticking time bomb, and one of our people stops it ala the Jack Bauer Method, then the law becomes moot.

Why is that, you ask? Because if torture were to reveal the ticking time bomb, then no grand jury would indict our homegrown Torquemada, and no jury would convict him. End of story.

Waterboard Sandy Berger

America tortures prisoners of war.

That will be the last legacy of the Bush administration.

George Bush and his administration, and most importantly his administration's supporters, are responsible for this disgrace upon America.

America tortures prisoners.

Thanks for that, George Bush and Bush supporters.

Just fell off the turnip truck, eh, MP? Are you also one of those folks who think Islamist terrorism started only after we invaded Iraq, too?

Stephen, I'd like to think that, as you say, no grand jury would indict and no jury convict in the ticking-time-bomb scenario. But these days, I just don't know. I think it's far more likely that the reaction from the Left would be to dismiss any prospective plot uncovered via "torture" as being no real threat, just as they've done almost all the ones discovered and stopped so far. The kind of shrill, monomaniacal outcry generated will have its effect on who gets prosecuted and who doesn't -- count on it. In the end, politics almost always plays a role in prosecutions, just as it does in warfare.

Ahh, the Patriotic Left: is there NO aspect of the struggle against Islamofascism they can't hobble or hamstring?

It's quite another to line al Qaeda's pockets at the expense of an American company.

You're saying that the ACLU is donating to al-Qaeda? We're in tin foil hat territory, I see.

Re: the lawsuit: the government has the deepest pockets of anyone, so your analysis is off the mark. It's not a question of deep pockets, but likelihood of legal victory. The CIA has defenses and arguments that will be harder for a private actor to pull off.

Okay. So where are all of our gun enthusiasts? Isn’t this kind of like suing Smith & Wesson for manufacturing a gun that was purchased by someone – then sold to a second party – and consequently stolen from that person by some unknown third party who used it to kill someone?

Perhaps I am way behind times here and Smith & Wesson has already been sued in the same type of scenario. If so, what was the outcome? I’m putting my $$$ on Boeing for this one.

And as far as the ACLU goes… Isn’t it about time – no, past time – for this roving band of thieves to be disbanded?

Its less a function of deep pockets than it is a function of non-sovereign pockets.

Boeing and its subsidiaries are, obviously, corporations--and so, on the face of it, unable to raise sovereign immunity and state secret defenses. Or even if they can, even if the feds enable them to do so, they are still at one remove. And discovery may be allowed to go forward in a way that it wouldn't if the same suit was brought against the U.S.

I still can't understand why torture has taken such a bad rap. The US has a moral responsibility to preserve, protect, and defend US citizens. Not using any available method for accomplishing that mission betrays the governments teleology.

As for the Geneva Convention (GC), I'm all for it. The GC clearly states who is and isn't protected. The current enemy clearly falls outside their criteria as to who is protected. So is the counterargument that the writers of the GC where confused and didn't mean what they wrote? They established this criteria to fill pages? Why would they have to qualify who is protected?

If Islamic fascists could reasonably ensure that they would apply GC to our guys, I have no qualms about reciprocating. But the reality is they have no intention of respecting out soldiers. The force of the GC lies in it's quid pro quo, not a shared sense of morality with our enemy.

MP: All I've seen any evidence of is that the US makes prisoners (not prisoners of war, which is a legal standard they don't meet) uncomfortable, often very uncomfortable.

And sometimes sends them to other countries that aren't so nice (which, oddly, Progressives think we should treat as allies. Like Syria.).

(I have heard only speculation about what happened at "CIA black helicopters, er, prisons". Speculations taken as fact whenever it suits the rhetorical purpose, I've found.)

It would be perfectly consonant with the laws and traditions of war to shoot such un-uniformed arms-bearers on the spot, though, if you're prefer that to loud music, being around women, being smeared with fake blood; that sort of thing.

(The "tortures" that the US has been shown to have done, which aren't torture.

Really unpleasant? Yes.

Torture? Only if one's goal is to cheapen the word to meaninglessness.)

Your glee in asserting that Teh Boosh has made "torture!!!" "America's legacy" suggests you're more interested in scoring anti-Bush points than actually entering a serious ethical discussion (or even seriously defining the terms and letting us all hash out what's actually been done vs. what's been accused breathlessly).

If the US government was blinding people, pulling out their fingernails, smashing their limbs, and other, you know, actual definite torture, I don't think we'd be having this discussion - because everyone would agree that it was torture and was utterly immoral.

The problem with your line is that what's alleged to have happened is not so clearly torture as those things (and what's definitely happened under policy is not torture at all); yet you blithely assert it's the same thing.

(And Sullivan would of course say that merely pointing out the differences makes one an apologist, I'm sure.)

"So is the counterargument that the writers of the GC where confused and didn't mean what they wrote?"

Hey, I think you might be onto something there, ID. Obviously, we ought to consider the GC a "living document." It works for the Constitution, after all. How could the framers of the Conventions possibly have foreseen...?

If it saves even one American life, torture the bastards. As far as I'm concerned, all bets are off after 9/11.

America tortures? If only.

Isn't that like suing GMAC because a GMAC-financed car was involved in a hit-n-run case?

Kind of.

This is basically a publicity stunt for fund raising purposes. The ACLU is going to have to prove that the Boeing subsidiary broke a law by scheduling flights for the government. That's not going to happen, so all that's going to come of this is that the ACLU is going to send out a whole lot of solicitations for donations and will bring in somewhat more dough than they would have otherwise.

That's all.

ps: not pro-torture, but very much pro-hanging and pro-firing squad. If you don't abide by the Geneva Conventions, you shouldn't be protected by them.

"Are you also one of those folks who think Islamist terrorism started only after we invaded Iraq, too?"

No Mike, but he might be one of those who knows Islamic terrorism really took off after the USA and its ally Pakistan funded, trained and promoted Islamic extremism in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 1980s. And when Israel funded Hamas as an Islamic extremist competitor to the largely secular and nationalist Fatah. Chickens, Home, Roost.

I have so much angst about this - I feel soooo bad for those poor terrorists who have done nothing to me personally however they have kicked the living shit out of my country.

You lefties really want to feel good all the time don't you? You want to feel good about babying the scum that would kill you, your wife and your kid without even batting an eyelash. You want to accord them the same "rights" that REAL AMERICAN CITIZENS have. Get real - they are enemy combatants and as such they have forfeited any such "rights" and deserve no better treatment than they give. You think our men and women get 3 squares, a/c and prayer rugs???? It really sickens me to think that people want these vermin cast loose on the world again. We should have saved a lot of trouble and extracted the information and quickly gave them a case of lead poisoning. This is far more merciful than our men will ever receive.

People seem to forget that extraordiny rendition was a tool of the Clinton Administration as well. Memories certainly are short among the anti-Bush group.

Mr. Green, it ain't 'cause of Sullivan that you need the disclaimers, overeager to throw elbows though Sullivan can be. It's because of the ample retards -- sadly on the right/Republican chorus -- defending torture, thus making Sullivan's pointing credible. It's guys who know better like Mitt Romney.

Thanks for writing against torture.
I'd thought that common sense killed the arguments for the morality and efficacy of torture decades ago. Wrong. We still have people stupid, insane, or evil enough to promote torture.
And they vote.
And get elected.

Regarding any kind of coercion, I always retreat to the same position: We need to abolish it, unreservedly. If, in the unlikely case, we ever do run into the Ticking Timebomb Scenario, then we have an obvious exception - but it's an exception the law should feel free to ignore.

But the problem with that approach is that is doesn't work. In the hyper-violent environment that is war, rules like this never stick because they don't draw any type of real line. It brings the question "what is coercion?" to the forefront, causing defenders of the rule to list them out. But something off list comes up. We start talking of various degrees in various contexts. Honest disagreements occur. And people wind up tortured. I mean, our current law states that offending the dignity of a questionee is torture. What the fuck is that? It's not a followable standard.
Hell, just by detaining an enemy, aren't we "coercing" them?

What needs to be "banned" is torture. Administering sodium pentathol to someone and asking them questions is not torture. It causes no pain or harm (I'd argue that for drugs the standard for "harm" being "does it induce psychosis?"). Note the giant national yawn about Abu Ghraib. Why? Because making people naked and taking pictures of them in cheerleader poses isn't torture by most Americans' definition of the word. Or the dictionary's for that matter. Harm (injury) or pain is an objective standard and as such can be followed.

But if we take it one step further and offer the single prescription of a safe protocol of sodium pentathol, we've made the definition even more operationally precise. What can we do in a ticking bomb scenario? Use sodium pentathol in the perscribed manner. What can't we do? Anything other than using sodium pentathol in the prescribed manner.

End of debate. And more importantly, end of torture. In real life, the most successful rules are typically the simplest ones.

yours/
peter.