1. clock
  2. Do we torture with a grimace or do we torture with a smile?

Do we torture with a grimace or do we torture with a smile?

By clock on September 16, 2006.

Publius has an interesting hypothesis about the way the torture/Geneva convention issue may blow back into BushCo face. Publius has been over optimistic before, but do you think he is overoptimistic now?

My feeling was that the split between two alternative military commission bills was a ruse - there is hardly any difference between them. By letting the McCain version win, Bush gets to do torture as much as he wants, while getting an opportunity to show public humility and going along with "the way the system works" and duping the nation that the "softer" version of the bill does not actually condone torture.

But even if that may have been correct initially, Publius argues that it has gone much further than Rove wanted and turned into a debate of what America stands for - something that BushCo does not want to have, of course. In the end, it may work well for those Republicans who have distanced themselves from Bush - and these are legion - and help them win in November, so who knows who the winner is going to be in the end. Your thoughts?

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I'm not convinced because the McCain-Warner-Graham troika has a long history of being outmanouvered or crumpling at the last moment. I hope Publius is right though.

I'm frankly puzzled. We've had the Geneva Convention for over 50 years now. What is not clear about article 3? Intentional application of any painful stimulus is by definition torture. More:it is clear (to me at least) that there can be only two motivations for torturing: pure sadistic pleasure, or pre-judging the victim a-priori as in possesion of the desired knowledge and of being "guilty" without trial. "We know you are guilty" is deservedly not admissible in a[n American] court of law.

Yet another of the many sources of bafflement over the last several years: we came into them with all the legal and institutional tools we needed to combat the problem, we knew (and generally lived by) that being nice to other folks begets more cooperation and assistence, and we had people on the ground who knew what they were doing in this context. Bu$hco have either incompetently used these resources, or very competently destroyed them, I'm not sure which.