Please stop torturing us

As best understood -- 44 featured two points about closing Guantanamo:Gitmo diminishes Great Satan's standing in world opinion and serves as a magnet for Great Satan haters to pick up an AK and join the Haj.

That's it.

In fact - it could be said that anything that isn't 8th century mohammedist, or recognizes and enables unfree regimes and their regional ambitions inflames enemies.

Enhanced Interrogation Techs may well be considered torture.

For now.

That could change. More journalists have been waterboarded than real live terrorists.

Besides, who ever heard of journalists volunteering to have their fingernails ripped out or out having irons bungee corded to their bodies?

It all depends how you frame it: The real debate is whether we torture them ourselves or outsource our torture to our less-savory allies. Cheney advocates the first option, Obama the latter. And per an article in yesterday's NY Times, the Obama torture regime is very likely going to be far more brutal and widespread. It just won't be covered on the evening news.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/world/24intel.html?_r=1&hp

I am with you on this one. The problem is that once a story takes off, it lasts for days, every guest in talk shows is an expert on something and explains to us idiots what is and what isn't right. Look at Cheney: we didn't know where the hell he was for 8 years, now we can't get rid of him and his expert eloquence against the current president. What happened to Beck? Can't he find any new topics to discuss about? Thanks for Rachel, she is a refreshing alternative and I do hope that some dumb exec in the network doesn't start meddling with her style.

I agree, we have had this argument and Cheney lost more than 4 years ago. I want the rule of law to guide this nation's actions.

Of course you are. You're a journalist. That just proves that the state propaganda is working.

Barack Obama comes out to reaffirm the basic right of the USA to do whatever it likes as long as it pretends there is some "security" rationale for it. So far, so very, very typically in the grand Democratic tradition from JFK onwards.

Dick Cheney in the meantime achieves two things. The first is to present the only cogent argument in the debate. It might well be morally repugnant but at least it has a certain sense. He's a monster who knows exactly what he is and doesn't care, inviting us all to embrace the monster rather than try and pretend it doesn't exist. The second is to distract journalists by ensuring that they have a "Not As Bad As" to slot into the standard "he said/she said" copy. Since it has never even occurred to anybody that, perhaps, American lives aren't worth any more than filthy foreign mooslem lives, nobody notices how that opinion is startling unmentioned and the whole debate becomes "boring".

Mission accomplished! You've done your job very well.

On the other hand, I find the whole thing endlessly fascinating. Just how amoral can people be before they start to realise what terrible people they are? The answer seems to be "very".

Hounshell tells us -- after being flip -- that he doesn't mean to be flip, and indeed snotty and ignorant are two other excellent adjectives to apply to this disgusting piece. If Foreign Policy is in fact a magazine, why on earth is it carrying this anti-journalism and pro-censorship argument? It honors a shallow idiot?

I agree that many bad and newsworthy things are happening in the world, but if that's a good reason to stop paying attention to official US torture, it's a much better reason to support forgetting that other thing unimportant to most of the world, Mr Hounshell's employment. Oh? He doesn't agree? On what ground? Oh. I see. Let the wretch sharpen pencils.

What Hounshell misses or else doesn't care about is that the most tiresome part of the torture reporting is how crappy it's proving.

Through what seems a major official conspiracy in the Bush years, the DoD came to an agreement that what General Taguba uncovered wasn't right, when he said blame for the Abu Ghraib scandal stretched up into the officer ranks, and that widely disseminated first set of Abu Ghraib pictures shouldn't ever be published, just laughed over by the pervert soldiers and their friends and families. The criminals thereafter sent to jail by the closed-circuit military justice system were all noncoms and lower.

Parts of the Taguba report seemingly remain censored, probably past any point of protecting anything other than some officers' careers.

In recent weeks, Secretary Gates entered into a conspiracy with senior command officers to shut down publication of further military torture photos -- thus proving what many have been saying for a generation or two, which is that the US war machine is more powerful than any President.

This new shutdown was justified by saying it was in favor of ordinary soldiers, marines, etc. Equally likely: it was in favor of guilty US military officers.

I long await investigation of that brief news report some years back that Ricardo Sanchez, then a general, was demanding more intelligence out of Abu Ghraib while using physical intimidation -- prodding a wilting junior officer in the chest repeatedly -- while doing it. Such prodding outside of the exigencies of battle is probably a military crime.

Digging out the hidden parts of the Taguba report -- found correct in all published particulars -- seems a good starting point. This doesn't sound like an assignment for Newshawk Hounshell. Will somebody peel him a grape?

The Abu Ghraib pictures were documents of the Bush/Cheney Torture era. The MI-MP's took the pictures to show, those above them, what the MI-MP's, that they were relieving, were doing to the insurgents. Those above them told them that what they were doing was legal and more importently, it was saving American Soldiers lives. They were then told to do what they were legally ordered to do.
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The MI-MP's took pictures to document what they were doing. They expected to use the pictures, after the war, when they sought psychological counsel from the VA. They didn't expect the pictures, of them doing what they were told to do, to be used against them.
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They were in Abu Ghraib. That's where pressure came down from the Whitehouse, prior to Dec. 13, 2003, to find where Sadam was hiding.
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They were in Abu Ghraib. That's where pressure came down from the Whitehouse, to get information, to stop the insurgency.
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They were in Abu Ghraib. That's where, after the Whitehouse had gone coward, the blame went.
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So when the Leftards thought they were winning the torture debate, they didn't get bored with it for what, six years?
Suddenly we are to believe that Leftards are still winning the debate (or at least Cheney is losing the debate) but that they are now bored with the whole thing? Please.
The only reason a Leftard gets bored with "proving" Bush=Hitler and Cheney=Satan is because they finally realize they look like a complete idiot in doing so.

It's not so much that the torture debate (and I can't even believe that it is debated like this... like somehow it's going to be determined OK) is getting too much attention as much it is that other issues are getting none. The biggest criminal offence of the Bush Administration, the war in Iraq, is a hundred times more than enough for all of these same people to spend the rest of their lives in prison. An illegal war fought under false pretences. But I suppose that might be 'boring' now as well?

Hey Diggs: try adding some content to otherwise pointless aphorisms. Leftard? Are you five?