Torture memos and the sale of the American soul

“Have you ever heard of blowing off steam?”
-Rush Limbaugh, in reference to the photos of detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib

I’ve been thinking a bit about the drive in the media to defend the practice of torture since it became public that we waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times in a month. Each argument to defend the practice can really be reduced to one or more of the following, each more specious than the one preceding it:

It’s not that bad. Guys in fraternities have been doing it for years; freshmen used to get hazed on football teams all the time. Let’s be honest with ourselves for once. Our government used some of the same techniques that were perfected in the Spanish Inquisition and used during the Salem Witch Trials. These are things that we put war lords and third world dictators on trial for in tribunals whenever we get the chance. It’s torture. Call it what it is.

We have to because we get so much good information from it. It’s only thing that kept us from being attacked again. I call this one the Bauer fallacy. It’s been demonstrated repeatedly that standard interrogation techniques consistently produce more reliable intelligence than torture does. And the whole “ticking bomb torture scenario” is a myth, so you can give it a rest. I’ll give that one a fair hearing after it’s been documented once in the history of the world.

Doctors and lawyers were overseeing the whole thing. That makes it all good. Yeah, doctors and lawyers never take part in unsavory things like holocausts, either.

Then there’s usually some broad claim about it being un-American to think that America should be held to the standards it set for itself. And it's all bullshit.