I Give You the Marquis GHB de Sade

There was at least one major point woefully missed (okay, purposely covered up) by the corporate media in the pathetic softball questioning of Mukasey, proven by his own testimony to be a certifiable torture-supporter and checks-and-balances-(as in the Constitution)-foe. There's no "debate" about whether waterboarding is torture or whether torture is illegal in the USA. The answers are Yes!, and YES, DAMN IT!! So, ever so typically, the corporate media have in lockstep presented this as a matter subject to wide-open question, sort of like the color choices for a makeover of the west wing. A pox on you, media. And for that matter, shame on you, Congress.


I offer up this image in a first speculation on the eventual outcome of our corrupt and failed government's attempts to hide the bush ineptitude and the cheney criminality.

Of course government doesn't work for the people when all you do is hire idiots and sycophants. Sadly we have worse than that here now.

This is the trailer of a Digby post. Please check out the first part here.

-clip-

I was on the Seder show earlier today and mentioned that broadcast (mangling the date Commander Swift mentioned, unfortunately.) It was in response to Sam's question as to whether the US has truly gone over the cliff. I said it was a near thing, mostly because of people like our friend Professor Rivkin there.

This man claims that if an American trainee can endure something, it can't legally be called torture. He shamefully goes even further to state that if we call it torture, it means that all of those who have trained our troops to withstand it are guilty of being torturers.
He neglects, of course, to admit that the recruits and trainees who are put though such exercises can quit at any time and they know very well that their instructors won't actually kill them. The total lack of control in the hands of someone who believes you are an enemy is what makes waterboarding torture, and people who do it voluntarily have control. That's the difference, and it's clear to anyone who isn't an intellectual fraud as Rivkin is.

He and others (like Pat Buchanan) are now saying that we need to make waterboarding explicitly illegal if we have a problem with it --- even though one would think that any torture that was used by the Spanish inquisition and Pol Pot would automatically come under the heading of "torture" which is illegal under at least five different statutes and treaties. They are trying to pretend that waterboarding isn't already illegal, pretending that waterboarding is merely "controversial" so they are pushing for a "debate."(Swift even admits that they've left us no choice between the weasel words, parsing and secrecy.)

There is good reason to surmise that one of the main reasons why they are pushing for this legislation is so that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld can't be indicted for war crimes retroactively. (Kind of like their friends the Telcoms.) After all, that's the real reason Mukasey was instructed to say that he didn't know if waterboarding was illegal. If he had, he might have been required to arrest some very important people who we know approved it.

But Rivkin's bobbing and weaving serves another purpose. He's literally defining deviancy down. He submits that these "stress positions" and the "hot and cold" and the waterboarding and other things they've done (plus God only knows what we aren't yet aware of) are necessary when you are dealing with "bad guys" who always lie. And anyway, if Army rangers can endure it in training then so can suspected terrorists (who've been blindfolded, stripped, sodomized repeatedly with "suppositories", held in painful restraints for days, subjected to extreme cold while being splashed with water and denied sleep.) This is what the right wing has left of their principles: if our special forces guys can live through something during their training that means it's ok for us to do it to others under much more terrifying circumstances.

There has been tragic a shift in our culture's taboos, thanks to schmucks like Alan Dershowitz and others who put this on the menu in the days after 9/11 and normalized the idea that torture might be ok --- as long as we're the torturers. There are plenty of people who agree with that reflexively. After all, our president told them right after 9/11 that we are good:

[H]ow do I respond when I see that in some Islamic countries there is vitriolic hatred for America? I'll tell you how I respond: I'm amazed. I'm amazed that there is such misunderstanding of what our country is about, that people would hate us. I am, I am -- like most Americans, I just can't believe it. Because I know how good we are, and we've go to do a better job of making our case.

So, if we are good (exceptionally good!) that means that whatever we do is good. But torture is bad. So, that means that no matter what we do it can't, by definition, be torture. See how that works? (I wonder if he also thinks this is a useful way to "make our case" to the rest of the world that we are good.)

This is more right wing rabbit-hole logic, and it's become a sick parody of itself now that they are openly using it to defend torture techniques from the Spanish Inquisition. You ask this man Rivkin if he would consider waterboarding torture if it were done to him and he said unequivocally, no. (He learned his lesson well. The last Republican lawyer who went out and had himself waterboarded was fired when he called it torture.) It's actually just another tool that good people use to defeat "bad guys." No biggie. It's not even illegal.