Thank you for this. I remember the quesy feeling I got when I read the pro-Empire and pro-Torture pieces in the Atlantic Monthly after 9/11 that were a sign of things to come. I thought, how did we reach a point that an intelectual magazine like the Atlantic monthly has no qualms about printing an article like this, without backlash? To see a backlash, you'd have to show the courage to publish the opposite article that should not have needed to be said: why we should NOT torture. Why we do NOT want to be an Empire.

I get the same feeling with the revisionist history of McCarthy and the Japanese Internment camps of WWII. When did basic humanity and common sense become un-PC? How did we come to so despise the American innovations of justice, civil rights and international cooperation that made us the envy of the world?

Also interesting that you mention Hollywood. They seem to glorify cynicism, it's all about gritty cynics making the tough choices to take out the bad guy. I get this uneasy feeling Bush's military policy was formed while watching Rambo I, II and III.

The irony is the real pragmatists don't want torture. The realists recognize that the war-at-all-costs, don't-tie-my-hands militarism doesn't work. Perhaps we ought to start thinking in terms of what will fight terrorism rather than what will exact revenge. 

Absolutely spot on post Memekiller!

This is the type of neferious crap that chickensh!t chickenhawks come up with due to the fact they'd never have the huevos to do something as violent as torture ... they need others to order around to do it for them.

And as far as Hollywood?

I get this uneasy feeling Bush's military policy was formed while watching Rambo I, II and III.

Now now now ... At least the purported upcoming Rambo IV will head in the direction of domestic rather than foreign policing policy ... it appears it will fit right in with the Florida vigilante style law of self-defense . . .

I think this is probably because they still believe that they've parsed the legal statutes well enough to come up with techniques that fail to meet the standard for torture - stress and duress, as they call it, or torture lite to their detractors.  It's funny how little plausible deniability has to be plausible these days, isn't it?

Perhaps Bush didn't read the credits of "Rambo III" (in which Rambo goes to Afghanistan to help the local people fight off the foreign occupiers). The film was dedicated, it says, to the brave and noble Mujahideen.

Larry thanks for the post and thanks for the words "crazy Dick Cheney". I have long thought this man is sick. He's out of his mind. I think his heart problem has reduced the flow of blood to his brain.

I guess I hope you're right, Wallace, even though the evidence seems to point the other way.  But the question here isn't whether anyone has actually tortured anyone else.  It concerns the VP's interest in hypothetical torture - in leaving the CIA exempted from not using torture techniques.  What's your opinon on that, Wallace?  Should our agents have the power to torture, not to say they do, or not?

Would you be affraid of a gun if you knew for a fact it wasn't loaded?

Would you give it freely to someone not knowing if they had bullets?

Cheney had a heart attack before he was forty, two more before he was fifty, at least one more before he was sixty. To paraphrase Casey Stengel, most people like Cheney are dead at the present time.

After all that came 9/11. It's possible that someone with his responsibilities, having survived so many brushes with death, might think: I've been spared for a great purpose. And the rest, unfortunately, is history.

The use of Denzel's movie Man On Fire as an example of how hollywood glorifies torture was a good one. However, Denzel also made The Siege (with Bruce Willis).  That movie has an excellent  example of the use of torture and how it's a bad thing.

The Siege also turned out to be quite precient on the subject of the erosion of civil liberties after a terrorist attack and the reaction (overreaction) of certain "bad" elements in the government. With an ending where the good guys win, I enjoy watching it if only to give hope that all is not lost, the revesals of civil liberties don't have to be permanent and cooler heads can prevail.

I'm getting gridlock trying to articulate all the fallacies here, so we'll just pick one.

 Personal knowledge: I have no personal knowledge (nor I think does Larry) of torture being committed. Of course, I have no personal knowledge of New Zealand either, so Peter Jackson better give all those Oscars back. On the other hand, do we have credible testimony from multiple sources that Americans have used torture? If you think CIA, FBI and military personnel are credible, then yes.

So the "traitor OR criminal" jibe is an obvious false dichotomy.

The Niger uranium fraud. The al-Libi fabrications. White House pressure on the CIA.
 
"The Iraq Intel Stonewall Crumbles."

If I trusted them, yes.

Actually someone like Richard Clarke, said much like: "Look, you keep it against the law to torture. If you've got the 'ticking clock' and you're the person on the scene you have to ask yourself if the damage to you justifies it. If you have to face the law, the jury and judge will consider this."

Well, how about this: the gun you're giving is to the next person who interrogates a U.S. soldier in their custody.  If we're going to say that it's okay for CIA agents to engage in inhumane treatment that's otherwise illegal, even though we know they don't do it, nobody who's our enemy on the battlefield is going to take that qualifier seriously, even if you do.

For the most part, I do trust the military, and I do trust the CIA.  For the most part, I trust the overwhelming majority of humanity to be unwilling to take up waterboarding, or to run an electric current through a defenseless person in their custody.  But if we're going to set up a system where the United States government makes it official policy to allow torture, then torture is going to happen.  It may be by our agents, it may be to our agents, or it may involve other parties altogether.  But this Cheney exemption will have repercussions somewhere.

Check out Jane Mayer's story in the latest issue of the New Yorker.  You can find it cross posted at truthout.org.  It will answer your torture question. We need to get you out more.  Obviously you've not paid attention to Dick Cheney's effort to pushback at John McCain's efforts to resist greenlighting torture for the CIA.

I just did, and thanks for the history lesson, apparently all of this "supposed" evil stuff that Bush and Chenney are doing was started in the mid 90's under the Clinton administration, why didn't any of y'all mention this?

 If we're going to say that it's okay for CIA agents to engage in inhumane treatment that's otherwise illegal, even though we know they don't do it, nobody who's our enemy on the battlefield is going to take that qualifier seriously, even if you do.

Now who's in denial, have you not seen what these guys do to thier prisoners, not because of what they think is done by us, but because "Alla is great" (if you don't realize what I'm talking about the scream this as they slowly saw thier prisoners head off) now don't say "it's because we're in Iraq" cuz they did it to Richard Pearl long before we got there. I'm sure they were screaming it as they flew the planes into the Twin Towers in Ney York. I understand why tourture seems repulsive to you, it does to all humane people, if only we could face a "Humane enemy" some day.

As a matter of fact, the only film I've seen is the ones where the terrorist are chopping off the heads of innocent civillians.

Can we also please talk about the President's doubletalk in favor of torture and parse his words a little more closely?

"We do not torture" really means "we have defined torture out of existence; therefore, we do not torture under our definition." 

The only way the reporters and public can understand the answers the President gives to questions about torture is if they understand this crucial point.  It all goes back to a theory the administration's lawyers took from a few law review articles, the Unified Executive Theory.  According to this theory, and despite serious doubts about its constitutionality, the President, as Commander-in-Chief, is above the law, above both Congress and the Supreme Court.  Thus, Executive Orders allowing the CIA to torture cannot be subject to review. 

While this theory may seem alternately radical or implausible, the only way to understand what Bush says to about Torture is to look at it in this light.

So why is Cheney on his crusade if we don't do it and don't want the right to do it some more?

While I do believe that the highest levels of this administration have and continue to tolerate/condone/order detainee abuse up to and including torture, I think that there is a deeper level to Dick Cheney's opposition to the torture amendment.

Cheney, and this administration in general, is absolutely committed to enhancing and extending the power of the executive branch. At all times and in all ways, from their very first day in office, this administration has attempted to roll back legislative and judicial constraints on executive action.

This was a critical subtext to the recent Supreme court appointments - both Roberts and Miers were chosen, at least in part, because they would reliably support the administration's arguments for enhanced executive authority.  Note, for example, Roberts' role as an appellate judge in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld detainee case - now going to the Supreme Court - that backed the administration's claim that the Geneva Convention could not be enforced through U.S. courts. Miers, of course, was White House counsel at the time, and has been (and now, presumably, will continue to be) deeply embedded in the attempts to extend presidential authority.

Cheney's underlying message in regard to the McCain amendment is not "We need to torture detainees," it is: "Whether or not the U.S. currently is, or ever will use torture, we categorically deny Congress the right to set the rules."

And while I am personally disturbed by the continuing use of torture and abuse, I am at least as disturbed by this deeper trend of enhanced executive authority, reduced oversight, and limitations on public or legislative dissent.