Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post is fast becoming one of my favorite columnists. He is insightful, readable and usually right. Today’s missive on the torture debate is a case in point (my own torture column will run early next month in the Progressive Populist).
It’s past time to stop mincing words. The Decider, or maybe we should now call him the Inquisitor, sticks to anodyne euphemisms. He speaks of “alternative” questioning techniques, and his umbrella term for the whole shop of horrors is “the program.” Of course, he won’t fully detail the methods that were used in the secret CIA prisons — and who knows where else? — but various sources have said they have included not just the infamous “waterboarding,” which the administration apparently will reluctantly forswear, but also sleep deprivation, exposure to cold, bombardment with ear-splitting noise and other assaults that cause not just mental duress but physical agony. That is torture, and to call it anything else is a lie.
That kind of sharpness is lacking in too many writers in the mainstream press, who seem only to want to discuss the political implications of everything — as if “waterboarding” is the same thing as the hit and run. Please.
The thing about politics that is important is not the horserace, but the impact — it’s not whether George W. Bush is popular, has “political capital” or what-have-you, but what he does, to whom and why.
In the end, the torture question is a moral question and the questions it raises beyond the single immoral act are the keys to understanding where we are going with President Bush at the helm: “What kind of nation are we? What kind of people are we?”
To think we can torture, to think we can create a separate class under the law, that we can get away with a separate tiers of justice, that the threshold of humane behavior is different for different people — well, that does not bode well for anyone.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
Hank Kalet 