WASHINGTON, Dec. 12 - President Bush said Monday that he was "confident" that he could reach an agreement with Senator John McCain over legislative restrictions on American interrogations of captives in the fight against global terrorism.
Mr. Bush added that "we want to make sure we're in a position to be able to interrogate without torture" because there are "people who still want to hurt us."
I want you to focus on the lie here: George Bush wants to "make sure" we're "in a position" to be able to "interrogate without torture."
Is there any question that we're in a position to interrogate without torture? Is John McCain forcing us to interrogate with torture?
The New York Times goes on to "explain":
Mr. Bush's remarks, in an interview with NBC News, hinted at what appear to be the White House objectives in the talks that started with Vice President Dick Cheney's demand that intelligence agents be exempted from Mr. McCain's measure. For Mr. Cheney, this is also part of a broader struggle with Congress to reassert presidential prerogatives.
Ummm... that looks like they want to be able to interrogate with torture.
Really this crap reads worse than Pravda ever did or the North Korean media does today. It least in the latter case, the language is so gushing and flowery that you know it's every bit as true as Weekly World News.
This writing ain't even that good.
"You do what you have to do," Mr. McCain told Newsweek last month when asked what a president would do if such treatment was needed to extract information about coming attacks.
I've said before that the "ticking time bomb" scenario is bullshit, mostly from the "they're fanatics who plan well" perspective.
But I might as well pass along this bit by Arthur Silber destroying Krauthammer, that I came across yesterday. Silber quotes one Darius Rejali:
With regard to the "ticking time bomb" scenario, so beloved of torture's advocates [and which I discussed in Part I of this series, where I pointed out its fundamental errors], Rejali writes:
"What if time is short, as with a 'ticking bomb'? Does torture offer a shortcut? Real torture -- not the stuff of television -- takes days, if not weeks. Even torturers know this. There are three things that limit torture's value in this context."
Those "three things" are the medical limit, the resource limit, and the psychological limit. Consult the article for details.
This is a perspective I hadn't even considered; but yeah, it takes a lot longer than most ticking time bombs tick to be able to do anything "useful" under torture.
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