Another socialist blog

Molly Ivins has written one of the most sensible comments on George W. Bush’s torture policy I’ve yet seen.

A string of prisons in Eastern Europe in which suspects are held and tortured indefinitely, without trial, without lawyers, without the right to confront their accusers, without knowing the evidence or the charges against them, if any. Forever. It’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” Another secret prison in the midst of a military camp on an island run by an infamous dictator. Prisoner without a name, cell without a number.

Who are we? What have we become? The shining city on a hill, the beacon and bastion of refuge and freedom, a country born amidst the most magnificent ideals of freedom and justice, the greatest political heritage ever given to any people anywhere.

The last month’s news has been surreal indeed, even by the standards of this Presidency. The Senate has passed the McCain amendment outlawing torture of prisoners. I don’t know what’s more bizarre, the fact that some Senators voted against it, or the fact that the Senators think international law against torture needs to be fleshed out.

Then we have the President brazenly claiming, against mountains of evidence, that we simply don’t torture—but simultaneously threatening to veto the bill containing the McCain amendment, and refusing to say what the bill would require him to do differently.

The justification goes like this. We want the terrorists (read: anyone we take prisoner) to think we’ll torture them. So we can’t make it illegal to torture them. But trust us, we’re bluffing. We don’t torture. Never mind the childishness of this argument, as if the 300 million Americans were somehow keeping a big secret from the rest of the world. It reminds me of the goofball logic of nuclear deterrence, in which we have to believe the enemy is rational, and they have to believe we’re crazy. Here we are, self-appointed moral leaders of the world, deliberately broadcasting the message that we are amoral savages. No wonder terrorism is up.