The wrong part: “It seems that Dick Cheney, in an attempt to defend his legacy against a one-sided media’s constant attacks, is channeling his best “Batman” villain, “The Penguin” (Burgess Meredith-style), to square off with Obama on torture and what to do with the 240 terrorists currently guests at our tropical all inclusive resort in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.”

Except none of them have been convicted of anything, so how does he know they’re terrorists? We know for a fact we still have 17 Uighurs there whom are government has cleared of all charges but won’t release (even though the American Uighur community has offered to take care of them). One estimate is that a third of the people housed there had no connection to terrorism; other studies have put the level even higher.

The creepy part: “In short, Obama views torture pretty much as anything more than nicely asking a terrorist for information on Al-Qaida.

Obama tends to think there is a positive side to all murdering terrorists. I am not sure that Obama wouldn’t say, “Yes, I know Khalid Sheikh Mohammed murders people and is calling for death to America, but people should know he never forgets a birthday.” ”

Yes, I know Hart’s a humorist, or so everyone tells me, but as I’ve noted before, he’s mocking Obama for suggesting we not torture people. Regardless of the fact that torture is a crime, even when used on guilty people, and we’ve used it on multiple people who didn’t do anything.

That’s only funny if you think the idea of not torturing people is inherently ridiculous. And that attitude is just creepy.

Since I know Hart’s admirers keep grumbling I single him out, let me throw Kathleen Parker into the mix. In saluting Dick Cheney’s recent pro-torture speech, she quotes him respectfully saying that the torture was “legal, essential, justified, successful and the right thing to do.”

We know it wasn’t legal.
We have statements from people in the CIA and the FBi that it wasn’t essential, that regular interrogation techniques work fine, even on militants.
We know it wasn’t justified. Innocent people were tortured. And after 9/11, captives were tortured–with the go-ahead from the White House, as Bush has acknowledged–for information about the next big attack, and there wasn’t one. Torturing people for information they don’t have is not justified.
Plus, we have statements from DoD officials that at least some of the torture was directed to getting information about the nonexistent alQaida/Iraq link (we got some from one prisoner; it was bogus). In one case, the CIA said a prisoner was broken and compliant, so no more “harsh interrogation” was needed; they were told to keep going until he confessed to the linkage.
Parker asks what Obama would have done in the weeks after 9/11, but that ignores that the torture, like the Bush administration’s other lawbreaking acts, continued for several years afterwards. It wasn’t an act of panic, it was policy.
And it was not, and never will be, the right thing to do.

From David Triana of Navarre, in today’s Daily News: “Which one is worse? Giving the order to use harsh interrogation technqiues (call it torture if you must!) in the hope of getting a known terrorist who masterminded 9/11 to talk and possibly save thousands of lives … or giving the order to kill three despicable young pirates to save the life of one American mariner?”

Torture. That one was so easy, why did Triana even bother?

And of course, there’s no evidence, despite administration claims, that torture saved lives.

And keep in mind, according to Colin Powell aide Lawrence Wilkerson, one of the reasons for torturing wasn’t to save “thousands of lives,” it was to get confessions of an Iraq/al Qaida connection; in one case, after the interrogators ruled a subject “compliant,” word came down to keep torturing until they got that link. Check out Mother Jones for details.

If Iran caught a couple of special forces guys inside its borders and “believed” we might be preparing an attack, would Bauer consider them justified in using torture to get the truth?
If the Iranians used waterboarding, would he refer to that as “harsh tactics?”

I caught the end of this season of 24 this morning (on DVR). As usual, it was absolutely gripping … but at the end, it grips the wrong idea.
This season has been emphatic about the Ticking Bomb justifying torture, wireless eavesdropping, etc., etc., even though it shows Jack Bauer himself less than comfortable with the things he’s doing (the more cynical side of me says that’s the perfect way to show moral qualms over torture—feel really, really bad about it, but do it anyway).

Jack’s sidekick of the season, Renee Walker, is initially horrified by Jack’s approach, then finds herself with no other way to save lives and get the job done than to use the Bauer methods. At the end of the episode, Bauer tells her he knows that he should obey the law—but if he can save lives by going outside it, he couldn’t live with himself if he played by the rules.

At the end of the episode, sinister mastermind Alan Wilson is in handcuffs (revealed as the bad guy behind everything that’s happened the past three seasons), but he gloats to Renee that no-one will ever prove he had anything to do with the terrorist conspiracy. So before the federal agents come to pick up Wilson, Renee locks up whining liberal Janine Garofalo (who’s been protesting civil-rights violations just to prove how absurd that is in a Ticking Bomb scenario) and walks into Wilson’s interrogation room …

Which is a perfect example of the slippery slope of torture. Sure, Wilson claims he can’t be touched (and so has no need to talk), but we don’t know that. He’s only just appeared on stage and the FBI’s gathered no intelligence about him, his contacts, his activities; Renee has made no attempt at sweating him the usual ways or having him tracked to learn who he’s involved with. So what makes her think torture is the only option? What if it isn’t? And yes, he’s undoubtedly going to launch other evil schemes, but the immediate bioweapon terrorist plot is over, the WMD destroyed, so there’s no ticking bomb.
And that, I’d say, says more about why we shouldn’t torture than all 24’s assertions to the contrary.