Politics is, by and large, the art of taking seemingly contradictory positions and pretending to take both of them on the basis of principle. That's true of both parties most of the time. But rarely have I seen an example so blatant and brazen as the Bush administration's position on torture. "We do not torture," declared the President in Panama. In the meantime, the Vice President is lobbying Congress to stop them from passing a law forbidding American agents from using torture to extract information. And his argument is that if they're not allowed to use torture - the very thing they claim they're not using - it will impede their ability to protect us. Could the contradiction possibly be any more obvious?
Look, this is a really serious issue. I think most Americans probably would say that if you've captured a high ranking Al Qaeda official, someone with real knowledge of the identity of other operatives and the nature of future operations, you should use pretty much any means you can to get that information from them - sleep deprivation, drugs like sodium pentathol, good cop/bad cop, whatever it takes. And frankly, that's a pretty compelling position and it should not be taken lightly. The life it saves may well be one of us. The position taken by John McCain, himself a victim of torture at the hands of the North Vietnamese, is also a serious position that should not be taken lightly. It is morally and intellectually compelling. But if we're going to have a debate about this, let's have it in the open and let's have it honestly.
This administration's penchant for deceit and cover up (and by saying that, it doesn't necessarily mean that another administration would be different, but facts are facts) does not help the situation any. Covering up the extent and severity of abuses at Abu Ghraib don't help us in the eyes of the world, it destroys our moral credibility when we criticize others for human rights abuses. Running secret prisons in former communist states, some of them apparently in the same facilities that once housed the secret police of brutal dictators, and then pretending that we don't do any such thing only saps our credibility and fuels anti-American hatred. I don't have any easy answers to the situation and I don't pretend to. But it's time to end this blatant hypocrisy and take a stand, one way or the other.