…because it was posted last year, and I just got to it. But:
Double-think is doubleplusgood
By Thoreau
Greenwald reports on the most fascinating of prosecutions: The Bush administration is seeking a prison sentence of 147 years for the son of former Liberian President Charles Taylor, for his involvement with torture.
This is the sort of case that sets precedents, precedents that might just be USEFUL…. Perhaps the sentence should be hanging?
EDIT: To be completely, 100% clear, if there is to be a punishment of any sort, capital or otherwise, I want it handed down by a court of law after a fair and open trial. I am not calling for any sort of lawless violence by anybody. If this is being read by the FBI, the Secret Service, or the Ft. Meade branch of the Ministerium fur Staatssicherheit, I want that to be perfectly clear. I have no desire to see any of these guys fall victim to a crime. If I wanted lawless violence, I would have voted for Bush in 2004 and applied for a job as a Gitmo interrogator. I want law and order. Nothing less.
That might be entertaining, had the Bush Administration employed anything that any person with the intelligence of an eggplant would call “torture.”
If what we’re doing isn’t torture, then we should stop it, as it’s obviously ineffective. It’s a semantic game: yes, it’s torture, but unlike other countries’ tortures, it leaves no lasting damage. And like Ace says, you want torture, try the top of the WTC on 9/11.
If it were ineffective, we wouldn’t be doing it. And no, it is not torture. The author of this cited article is another moral equivalence idiot with no sense of proportion — a common affliction among liberaltarians and leftists.
From the Anchoress, today:
It’s torture. It’s the least, most humane torture that works. And “working” in this case aaves a lot of pain overall.