Torture

Astonishingly there remain some people who don’t think that waterboarding prisoners rises to the level of torture. In Dick Cheney’s off-hand formulation it’s merely “dunking in water” – as though the process was some kind of ride at the funfair or comparable to having a bucket of gloop tipped over you in a TV game show. Helpfully, Mark Benjamin has a piece at Salon explaining how it really works: Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney “specially designed” to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to

Dick Cheney, surely now confirmed as the worst Vice-President in American history, produced a cracker, even by his miserable standards, during his interview with Fox’s Chris Wallace on Sunday. The subject was “harsh interrogation techniques”: WALLACE: So even these cases where they went beyond the specific legal authorization, you’re OK with it. CHENEY: I am. Well, you can’t get much clearer than that, can you? The contempt with which Cheney views the rule of law is quite breathtaking. Not that, given everything we know about the Vice-Presidents’ term in office, it should really come as any great surprise. But still… Now that George W Bush has retreated to Crawford to

Ann Althouse argues that Critics of “harsh interrogation techniques” — they, of course, call it torture — bolster their moral arguments with the pragmatic argument that it doesn’t even work. How unusual it is for the media to disillusion us about that and force the moralists to get by on moral ideals alone! Responding to this, Publius reminds her that these “non-torture” techniques have killed people and Lindsay Beyerstein picks apart the Washington Post story that Althouse claims vindicates Dick Cheney.  All of which is all very well and good. I don’t doubt that torture – or whatever euphemism you want to give it – can work. But so what?

The loathsome Peter King is at it again. Speaking to Politico, he’s up in arms that some people think torturing prisoners is wrong. King, channeling both the sense of outrage and of political opportunity felt in parts of the GOP, defended in detail the interrogation practices — threats to kill a detainee’s family, and or to kill a detainee with a power drill — detailed in a CIA inspector general report released yesterday. “You’re talking about threatening to kill a guy, threatening to attack his family, threatening to use an electric drill on him — but never doing it,” King said.  “You have that on the one hand — and on the other you

Well, according to Dick Cheney, George W Bush was just as almost as bad as your average America-hating euro-weenie or member of the Democratic Congressional caucus. Barton Gellman – whose sourcing is pretty good – reports that: Cheney’s disappointment with the former president surfaced recently in one of the informal conversations he is holding to discuss the book with authors, diplomats, policy experts and past colleagues. By habit, he listens more than he talks, but Cheney broke form when asked about his regrets. “In the second term, he felt Bush was moving away from him,” said a participant in the recent gathering, describing Cheney’s reply. “He said Bush was shackled

There isn’t one. That was a trick headline. The line between a state that tortures and the state that does everything in its power to avoid the physical abuse of individuals in its name is what defined the late twentieth century drive against barbarism. When the French were exposed using specially adapted field radios to pass electric shocks through suspected rebels in Algeria it rightly caused outrage in a world still recovering from the reality of the Holocaust.  We are a little less easy to horrify now. But the revelation that our own intelligence services have been prepared to use the fruits of torture, however unwittingly, still has the ability to digust. The response this