Orwell created doublethink. Andy seems to be speaking quadruplethink, at least.

I think I’m getting nauseous.

Ahhhh if there was any justice these creatures would be subject to the same ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ that they so blithely approved of or are attempting to justify.

Unfortunately I believe that the best I can hope for is that at least some of them will have to be very, very careful about what countries they visit.

“In my mind, we should never resort to enhanced measures unless we believe in good faith that attacks are being planned and possibly imminent.” Let’s see.

“In my mind, you should never resort to robbing banks unless you believe in good faith that your cash flow is really strained and your bank is about to foreclose.”

Which part of “It’s illegal-against the law-not allowed” are they having such a hard time with? The ease with which they overlook that fundamental stumbling block in their eagerness to argue that this was all nothing more than frat boy games and/or perfectly acceptable is quite striking. “Once you decide to have [torture] in your arsenal…” you’d be in deep, deep shit if this wasn’t such a goddamn banana republic, where, apparently you can get away with being John Yoo and Jay Bybee…

Greenwald’s interview with the UN’s head torture honcho was spot on. It doesn’t matter if your victim tells you Osama Bin Laden’s zip+4 and throws in a killer cheesecake recipe for good measure; you can’t torture him to get that info. And experience has shown that he’s just as likely to make shit up to make you stop anyway, so you might as well not bother. Unless you’re a sadistic wingnut or write for the Corner, but I repeat myself.

“The pertinent question is whether the interrogations gave us valuable information…”

No, it isn’t.

“In my mind, we should never resort to enhanced measures unless we believe in good faith that attacks are being planned and possibly imminent.”

Interestingly,as long as that stays in your mind, we don’t have a problem….

Shorter Andy McCarthy: I am opposed to torture unless it seemed like a good idea at the time. The intel we get or fail to get from torture is ultimately irrelevant.

The pertinent question is whether the interrogations gave us valuable information about al Qaeda that we wouldn’t have gotten, in a timely manner, without it.

It’s only a pertinent question if you’re an amoral scumbag scrambling to defend an abhorrent practice that puts you at the level of the enemy you claim is morally inferior. But to indulge his sorry ass, the answer is no.

Why is Andy not considering this scenario: Enemy states/terrorists discover US torture practices and subject US POWs to these same practices. If US officials are off the hook for authorizing these same practices, they can’t very well turn around and wag their fingers can they?

Empathy of a lower tier minor reptile and the morals of a particularly debauched sewer rat. Not that smart, either. Whatta motherfucking POS.

In my mind they are all torturers and war criminals.

Enjoy.

It’s like a grace note for sociopaths.

Once again, your eloquence justifies the time I spend on the Internet.

McCarthy:

You’ll probably recall that a number of us argued that there was an important relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. Small wonder: mounds of evidence showed the ties included funding, weapons development, training, harboring, and mutual non-aggression.

Yes we recall these lies. But when the former administration admits there was no connection, why do you continue to lie?

I wish bloggers could have a discussion about torture without putting up the Abu Ghraib pictures over and over. It’s always a shock to click on them and they tell us nothing new.

I’m with Lesley @7: I don’t want it to happen, but can you imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth if a US soldier were dragged naked, on a leash, by some enemy soldier or insurgent/resistance fighter/terrorist? The Geneva Conventions applied to everyone. The worst humiliation — other than being allied with WPE — they have endured is a wedgie.

And evietoo @ 12, they may not tell us anything new but we were told at the time that this was an isolated instance, a few bad apples, etc. Now we know it was just a proving ground for these techniques. That’s new and probably won’t be the last we hear about them. Maybe Rumsfeld watched a session.

The Washington Post went long on torture in Sunday’s edition — dueling op-eds from two guys who wrote books, one of whom was Michael Scherer wanting to know “What if we had Osama — then what???”, a good bit from Walter Pincus on how all the CIA-based scandals can be traced back to orders from the White House, the usual Villager crap from David Broder and, surprisingly, conservative Kathleen Parker gets to the heart of the matter: “If you have to ask whether it’s torture, it’s torture.” More on that here.

But when the former administration admits there was no connection, why do you continue to lie?

Perhaps the pertinent question is whether a “forceful interrogation” of McCarthy using “enhanced measures” will give us the answer that we would’t be able to get, in a timely manner, without it.

Let us be crystal clear. There is nothing to parse, quibble, or defend. Americans, acting in an official capacity tortured people. Other Americans, also acting in an official capacity, ordered them to do so and offered legal cover for doing so. We tried, imprisoned, and even executed Japanese and Germans for exactly the same acts after WW II, defining them as torture. The Armed Forces SERE Program defines them as torture. Under the United Nations’ Convention on Torture, to which we are a signatory, we have an absolute, unconditional, affirmative obligation to investigate all accusations of torture and to prosecute and punish anyone who has committed, ordered, or enabled torture. This is the law. It is binding law in the United States. We have to investigate and prosecute everyone involved or we cease to be a nation of laws. It does not matter if it works. It does not matter what our enemies do. It does not matter if there is a ticking timebomb. It is quite simply illegal to torture.

Why can’t the various villagers not get the crystal clear logic as stated by Dr. Dick just above this comment? You’d think maybe their jobs or access to the cocktail weenies was at risk or something…

Kathleen really has jumped off the crazy train. Maybe she liked all the attention she got after dissing St. Sarah of the Tundra.

DrDick,

Conspiracy to commit torture is also covered:

U.S. Code : Title 18

Section 2340A. Torture

(a) Offense. – Whoever outside the United States commits or
attempts to commit torture shall be fined under this title or
imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and if death results to
any person from conduct prohibited by this subsection, shall be
punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life.
(b) Jurisdiction. – There is jurisdiction over the activity
prohibited in subsection (a) if -
(1) the alleged offender is a national of the United States; or
(2) the alleged offender is present in the United States,
irrespective of the nationality of the victim or alleged
offender.

(c) Conspiracy. – A person who conspires to commit an offense
under this section shall be subject to the same penalties (other
than the penalty of death) as the penalties prescribed for the
offense, the commission of which was the object of the conspiracy.

(I’m talking about the enhanced measures as we now understand them; I’m not saying it would have been worth actually torturing people as long as we were getting some helpful information about al Qaeda.)

What in the hell is he talking about? “Enhanced measures as we now understand them” IS torture. It has been defined as torture by the Geneva Conventions for decades; there is no argument or ambiguity. You don’t get to redefine armed robbery before you rob the 7-11 or murder before you shoot someone.

For the life of me, I cannot understand what synapses are not firing in these “Good Germans’” brains; the logical disconnect is so overpoweringly obvious. It’s a chasm of Grand Canyon proportions.

I used to wonder how anyone in Germany in the 30s and 40s could actually stand there with their arms shot up in the air,turning such a blind eye to what was happening in front of their faces. George Will, Broder, McCarthy, Ignatius, Cohen, other Cohen….on and on and on are all Good Germans and it’s a frightening thing to see in your own country. Christ Almighty.

That is covered under “ordered, or enabled torture” in mine above.

keep calling it what it is “torture”

“enhanced measures”

How many former Cia officers have said torture ‘does not work”. It is a huge list at this point.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/195089
‘We Could Have Done This the Right Way’

How Ali Soufan, an FBI agent, got Abu Zubaydah to talk without torture.

Sure, it’s crucial to study the quality of the information the tactics yielded in making the policy decision of whether they should ever be used. Once you decide to have them in your arsenal, however, the determination of whether they were properly employed on any one occasion has to hinge on the situation that existed before you decided to use them, not on whether they were effective on that occasion. Otherwise, you would be incentivizing interrogators to get rougher than necessary, since the propriety of the harsh tactics will be judged by what they get out of the guy rather than whether the situation called for harsh tactics.

…By adopting a policy decision to implement “enhanced interrogation” as a matter of course, we don’t have to concern ourselves with results-oriented outcomes, as these methods invariably result in incentivizing lying by prisoners. However, the fact that prisoners would lie to escape the infliction of pain more than justifies the use of torture, because you know “those people” are always plotting something evil that just MIGHT lead to imminent harm.

Is this the Andrew McCarthy who was once an actor — like in the Animal House pics?

If scumbags weren’t making a case for defending what’s in the photos, they wouldn’t need posting.

So you’re uncomfortable looking at what was done by the Bush administration to real people, some of whom weren’t guilty of anything other than being an Iraqi citizen.

Deal with it.

Otherwise, you would be incentivizing interrogators …

Nothing shows this asshole’s inability to think or feel like a human being more than his using the business school buzzword “incentivizing.” I’m only surprised he didn’t add that “drilling down” would have been a good idea too — into the detainees’ brains with an electric drill, of course. Or maybe the interrogators could have “leveraged” their pressure so as to achieve “synergies” of screams.

…Or Yoo’s ability to “think outside the box” “negatived” the somewhat “problematic” issue of jurisdiction by “outsourcing” enhanced interrogation to “independent contractors.”

I hear that NRO has a new mission statement: “Mangling the English language in the relentless pursuit of euphemisms.”

If you keep in mind the fact that no one outside the WH wanted torture, before or after 9/11, before the misadventures in the Mideast, then this assholes sophistry and “parsing” is nothing more than cheap lawyering for common criminals.

Even printing their arguments has a cost, in reinforcing the fundamental lie. You should never repeat any of their “torture got us good intelligence…” BS without pointing out that torture has nothing to do with interrogation.

Torture is primarily used to brutalize and terrorize people for the purpose of subjugating populations. The secondary purpose is to extract false confessions for propaganda use. It is useless in interrogation. The reason the right wing keeps using the euphemism “enhanced interrogation” is that it reinforces the lie. They should be called on it. At every opportunity.

PaulInSF:

You should add a third reason for torture: To a sadist, torturing a helpless human being is fun.