“Well, I’m not sure it is either. I’m not sure it is either. It depends on how it’s done. It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it. I think the way it’s been defined in the media, it shouldn’t be done. The way in which they have described it, particularly in the liberal media. So I would say, if that’s the description of it, then I can agree, that it shouldn’t be done. But I have to see what the real description of it is."
or...
ABRAMS: All right. Let me ask - Pat, you just real quick, I want to move on to—Pat, do you think it‘s torture?
BUCHANAN: I think when you have people on the table and make them think like they‘re drowning and they don‘t know if they‘re ever going to get up, that comes very close to it in my judgment. Certainly with this exception, if you‘re going to end it before something critical happens — I don‘t know.
Unfortunately for the Bush administration, the old "it depends on who's doing it" excuse doesn't work very well with the rule of law.
An important point, just not a philosophical point.
This is why we have spectacles like this taking place now:
The top legal adviser within the US state department, who counsels the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, on international law, has declined to rule out the use of the interrogation technique known as waterboarding even if it were applied by foreign intelligence services on US citizens. John Bellinger refused to denounce the technique, which has been condemned by human rights groups as a form of torture, during a debate on the Bush Administration’s stance on international law held by Guardian America, the Guardian’s US website. He said he would not include or exclude any technique without first considering whether it violated the convention on torture.
This is the crowd that prided itself on its so-called moral clarity. Why, "virtues czar" William Bennett even wrote a book about it called "Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War On Terrorism" in which he said:
The comparative study of culture and civilization is a quintessential product of western curiosity. It ought to fill us with complex but securely founded confidence in our own culture and civilization --- in its particular values and universal values...But the terrible effect of contemporary relativism --- a debased and decadent product of that same western impulse of curiosity --- is that instead of imbuing us with confidence, it fills us with self-doubt and debilitates us instead.
Do you feel debilitated? I don't. The lack of stupid infantile simplicity in moral decision making can only debilitate those who need it. Those who need it tend to be weak-willed people who fall for such obsessions as gambling.
Bennett was trying, as usual, to snidely blame liberalism for everything that is wrong in the world, but his words, when seen through the prism of right wing contemporary relativism ring true. When you have lost your moral moorings to the extent that you no longer can say with any "clarity" that tying someone down and repeatedly forcing them to inhale water into their lungs until they almost drown is torture, then I would suggest that you are indeed a moral relativist in the most pejorative sense of the word.
Read this amazing article from someone who knows it inside and out, on whether waterboarding is torture.
All those terms that conservatives used to love to use, the proud, patriotic words like Honor, Decency, Honesty, Morality no longer apply to them. The right-wing relativists have faced their own ultimate test and they have failed it in every possible way.
But, see, I can say with great clarity that we must not torture. We must respect the longstanding international ban on all torture. That's clear enough for most people. If you have to frost that clarity with metaphysical Platonic “clarity” then you are suffering from the same need for guidance and leadership that gives us neocons and fascism, which after all promotes very CLEAR rules, albeit horrific ones.
Articles like Digby's make use of a certain variety of relativism that I do oppose. Only Republicans are ever guilty. Democrats never are. This is an absurd pretense on the question of torture. So is the pretense that there is something philosophical here.
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