In Reply: Torture Creep

In reply:

Hoagie sez:
One other thing, repsac3. Sometimes you are unaware of a “ticking timebomb” until you push enough buttons to uncover it. Saying “pretty-please” usually won’t work. Trust me.

Good article on the "torture creep" that Hoagie may or may not be advocating in his comment above about being unaware of ticking timebombs until you've "pushed enough buttons" to uncover it (a potentially ominous phrase, if ever I read one.)

Torture Opponents Were Right - Conor Friedersdorf - Politics - The Atlantic. The key paragraph:

The return of the torture debate is striking because its apologists no longer feel the need to advocate for a narrow exception to prevent an American city from being nuked or a busload of children from dying. In the jubilation over getting bin Laden, they're instead employing this frightening standard: torture of multiple detainees is justified if it might produce a single useful nugget that, combined with lots of other intelligence, helps lead us to the secret location of the highest value terrorist leader many years later. It's suddenly the new baseline in our renewed national argument.

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Posted 5 May 2011 at 18:43

Added, 7:15 PM: Reading this comment over, I was far too kind... Not only is it what Hoagie was advocating, it's what every person who offers some variation of "Waterboarding / Enhanced Interrogation Tactics / Torture Works!!" is advocating. (For the record, one of those is a real right wing blog post title, right down to the exclamation points.) The fuse on the potential time bomb can now be seven years long, and the torture is still justified... and that's just nuts.