It is now acceptable to go on national TV and argue openly for the use of torture as formal US bi-partisan consensus policy.
I went looking to see what I could find in terms of prominent media figures defending the use of torture, and here's what I found.
Most egregious is radio host and (non-practising, I hope) attorney Michael Smerconish who is a regular contributer to Hardball. Here he is in December of 2008:
MATTHEWS: KSM is Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. [Vice President Cheney] approved the waterboarding. He said it's fine. Michael Smerconish, you agree?
MICHAEL SMERCONISH, RADIO TALK SHOW HOST, MSNBC POLITICAL ANALYST: I agree. [...]
I'll tell you something else, Chris. You've got to believe in the efficacy of water boarding because one has to suspect that the best of our interrogators would be assigned to KSM. And if that man or that women believed that these means were necessary, then obviously, they believe in the efficacy of waterboarding.
And frankly, there are no measures that I would be unwilling to say-or I would be willing to say are inappropriate for the likes of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Mine is a blanket endorsement...
MATTHEWS: So shoot his toes off one at a time.
SMERCONISH: ... of whatever is necessary.
MATTHEWS: No, no, no. Michael, shoot his toes off one at a time is fine with you. You just said that, right? Anything is OK with you?
[...]
SMERCONISH: Yes, Chris, I believe that if you're dealing with the operations planner of September 11 and if this individual has actionable intelligence, that there are no means that should not be employed. [...]
Let me stop here and note this man is not just a guest, but in fact is paid by MSNBC to provide commentary like this. There is simply no one from the left of any comparable extremism who even appears on TV never mind being actually paid to do so. You have to go to Comedy Central to find a television host willing to point out the Israeli assault on Gaza isn't exactly a moral no-brainer but you can be paid by MSNBC to overtly endorse the use of literally any form of torture on terrorism suspects. MSNBC, the liberal answer to Fox.
Don't worry though, MSNBC was so offended by his conduct they had him back on tonight (Jan 12), (from Media Matters) again making similar explicit arguments for any form of torture conceivable.
Keep in mind also this man is a lawyer. (Perhaps the state bars that have admitted him would be interested in these views?)
I suppose if MSNBC was going to fire anyone for advocating crimes against humanity, they would have to look higher on their food chain than a mere analyst. On his show today, Drowning Joe made this sober and passionate defence of atrocity:
SCARBOROUGH: Yes I do. Yes I do. And I know for a fact that waterboarding brought our interrogators, brought Americans, probably about 70-75 percent of what they get. What they got from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed opened doors that we are still going through. Waterboarding has produced and given so much evidence to our people in the CIA and in the other intelligence agencies. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed by himself has done more to crush al Qaeda than Dick Cheney or George Bush because of waterboarding.
I suppose you can say that at least Scarborough is still playing the "waterboarding isn't torture" canard but that's the kind of moral difference that should get one a slightly larger cell in the Hague, perhaps one with a window.
And lest it end with waterboarding, he manages to get both more asinine and reprehensible: (transcript mine)
Q: Do you think Barack Obama will support waterboarding? Do you think there will be waterboarding in Obama's administration?
SCARBOROUGH: Waterboarding won't work, because we as Americans have talked about waterboarding so much, that Al Qaeda--who studies what we do; Al-Qaeda says "this is what's going to happen, they're going to pour water, you're going to feel like you're drowning, work through it ok, because they can't kill you."
Q: So do you think Obama's guys are going to invent new forms of torture that Al-Qaeda doesn't know about?
SCARBOROUGH: Well, it depends how you define torture [...]
Put aside the absurd notion that you can somehow prepare yourself for being drowned and resist ingrained physiological human survival instinctive reactions that occur when liquid fills your lungs (ask Hitchens). Scarborough is endorsing other, new forms of torture being used to compel cooperation.
(By the way, the questions above come from Chrystia Freeland of the Financial Times who admirably goes on to call waterboarding, stress positions and sleep deprivation torture, suffering Joe's condescension for her efforts, I wonder if MSNBC will give her the boot?)
Lastly (for the moment) we have Newsweek, whose front page story "What Would Dick Do?" is described by the Columbia Journalism Review like this:
Written by Newsweek veteran Evan Thomas and National Journal contributor Stuart Taylor Jr., this article has no connection to serious journalism whatsoever.
Let us examine a few of its highlights:
The issue of torture is more complicated than it seems. America brought untold shame on itself with the abuses at Abu Ghraib. It's likely that the take-the-gloves-off attitude of Cheney and his allies filtered down through the ranks, until untrained prison guards with sadistic tendencies were making sport with electric shock. But no direct link has been reported.
Leave aside for a moment the comforting image of "making sport with electric shock." (The ACLU has documented the deaths of at least 160 prisoners in U.S. custody during the Bush administration, of which more than seventy were caused by "gross recklessness, abuse, or torture": an unfortunate side effect of that "sport," I suppose.) Let us focus instead on that tossed-off assertion of "no direct link" between Cheney and his allies and what happened on the ground in Iraq and Guantánamo.
and
Proceeding briskly from unconscionable ignorance to outrageous conclusion, Newsweek's Taylor and Thomas praise Bush for vetoing the law that would have required the CIA to use "no investigative methods other than those permitted in the Army Filed Manual" because "these are extremely restrictive." Indeed, they are restrictive: they are the rules that every previous administration has adhered to since World War II, because they prevent Americans from committing exactly the same kind of war crimes we prosecuted at Nuremberg.
If this is allowed to stand, I don't know what could stop it. America is now living the Stanford Prison Experiment and the people who would tell Milgram "no" when asked to delivery a dangerous electric shock to an unwilling and helpless subject are now being sneered at by the triple-x'ers like Scarborough.
I don't know of any more emphatic terms with which to argue any more forcefully for Obama to be willing to surrender whatever political capital is needed in order to address this. It might even be worth a "failed" Jimmy Carter or Harry Truman single term presidency. It is a sign of the extraordinary mass mental illness that America is suffering, and if you ever wondered why a Canuck like me would spend so much time leaning over his neighbour's fence being nosey, this is a big example of why. This isn't normal politics and it won't be fixed by UHC or a Cap and Trade system or withdrawal from Iraq.
These people are on the moral plane of holocaust deniers. They are denying or even justifying that crimes against humanity are taking place. I had really hoped that the election of Obama, and for that matter the primary victory of the only ostensibly anti-torture Republican (yes, he was craven and caved on torture but at least he was nominally opposed to it unlike the other frontrunners) would be taken as a sign that torture had been repudiated by the electorates of both parties. Not so.
Things arguably aren't even better, since Obama is now being set up to be "soft on terror" for not meeting the bar of his predecessor in meting out brutality and terror as tools to frighten America's foes. He will be blamed for not using torture if there is another attack on his watch. Sure, he won't use torture himself, but now we are in goatee evil-America where not using torture costs you political capital, like some childish indulgence.
Obama has to fix this, as I don't believe we can expect Congress to do this on their own. After all, Scarborough makes a good point:
Democratic leaders were briefed fully on what was happening, post 9/11, in Gitmo, with aggressive interrogation techniques. They went along with it.
The Bush Administration really do think like the Mafia. They made sure to sully their opponents in their crimes so that they could never go to the authorities about it. Obama's short tenure in Congress is his biggest asset here, they hadn't blooded him yet.
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