Quick, name any nation in history that we congratulate for their torture. That's kind of a stumper, isn't it? A willingness to resort to torture has never been a characteristic of "the good guys." When we look back at torturers of the past, we see people we assume are cowards, zealots, or sadists. At no point in human history do we look at a torturer and think, "Now that guy was a real hero."But that's how we're being asked to view the Bush administration. For them, torture was a "tough decision" that was forced on them. They looked at their options, decided the stakes were too high for petty concerns such as morality, human rights, or law, and went right ahead designing a system of torture to "keep Americans safe."
We know what they're going to say before they even say it. We've heard the arguments so often we can repeat them in our sleep. But the fact is that the administration that failed so disastrously on 9/11 felt they had no choice but to overcompensate. They would stop at nothing, not to keep us safe, but to keep their historical legacy and their political relevance safe. They'd been through the 9/11 Commission once and, flawed as that investigation was, it pretty much brought the Bush White House to a standstill for a while. They had Social Security to privatize, they had taxes to cut, they had a conservative economic policy to institute and thereby prove flawless. You've heard of the "ticking time bomb scenario?" That was the Bush administration -- after September 11, 2001, they had eight years at best and four years at worst. The clock was ticking and they couldn't afford to be sidetracked again. So, in a panic that they may not be able to reinvent every part of America in their wingnut image, the Bush administration resorted to torture.
Yeah, they were real freakin' heroes... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
