This is What We’ve Become
What bothers me about the torture debate in the blogosphere is how thoroughly eager those in favor of torture harsh interrogation tactics used against accused terrorists are willing to define this deviant behavior down. Witness this comment in this post at Oxblog:
Toture [sic] is that which causes permanent physical damage. Anything else is just hazing.
Our enemies are making a deliberate attempt to lower the definition of torture for the benefit of terrorists.
It is not moral to refuse to waterboard someone and let innocent people die because we are unwilling to get answers to questions using a method that causes no physical harm.
How does this person "know" that this doesn’t cause physical harm? Because David Horowitz says so! (The Oxbloggers, to their credit, have been squarely against parsing the definition of torture.) So let’s so see who also waterboards. Courtesy of Marc Cooper, David Corn points out that this was one of the methods used by the Khmer Rouge. One would expect thinking people to find that horrifying.
Not Tom Maguire:
Well, if a picture is worth a thousand words, this will be one of my longest posts. Here is Vann Nath, an artist and former prisoner of the Khmer Rouge, and his drawings of various Khmer Rouge tortures (one of his pictures appears without credit in the Corn post, presumably through no fault of Mr. Corn).
So, let’s play Find the Waterboard! Not here; not here; not here; not here; not here; not here. Hmm, those Khmer Rouge had a wide variety of nasty, didn’t they? I don’t think I am going to rank "waterboarding" at the top of the list offered by Vann Nath.
So Maguire doesn’t believe that waterboarding is such a horrible thing because the Khmer Rouge had a wide variety of torture methods. This is what passes for intelligent commentary on the pro-torture right.
God help us.



