What Karen Yvonne #111 said, so very well.
Mark Shea’s irresponsible ‘Catholic’ anti-’torture’ fancies make me almost – almost – willing to forgive foolish old canards about all those nice Protestants who didn’t actually eviscerate the heart of the Christian faith by their ‘reasonable’ elimination of the pesky doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and who didn’t gain traction due to support from ambitious new elites out for their own purposes, but who instead were really all about reason and education for The Little Guy.
For me, a large part of the evil of the current politicization of torture is that, unlike the discussion here, it is fundamentally unserious. It consists of status games for the benefit of elites. The ‘principles’ espoused, even the ‘people’ to be so concerned about, are completely fungible. If they exist at all, they exist as plenipotentiaries in the drama orchestrated by the Real People, the ongoing soap opera a sage thinker has begun to call Stuff White People Like.
In the small, we use the techniques deployed by Whiter People to make us feel nicer than somebody else; in the large, they are chits in the political war.
The acceptable collateral damage is not just the deteriorating HUMINT Habu refers to, but all sorts of people, among them, all the lawyers in the Bush Administration who (according to former Washington attorney Laura Ingraham, who knows some of them), gave up $3-4 million a year in Washington law firms to, you know, serve their country, and actually tried to grasp the nettle of what is ‘civilized,’ and ended up approving only those interrogation techniques used in training our own armed forces, only those which had been proved in long experience to inflict no permanent physical or mental damage.
Now the $3-4 million they gave up, they may end up paying out, in legal fees to defend themselves.
As Mr. Shannon Love points out at the Chicago Boyz site, the American Left has long been playing this game: “Leftists like to talk big about how horrible and murderous America’s military and intelligence services are, but history has shown that they are just hypocritical cowards when it comes to acting on their hysterical rhetoric.”
He reminds us that:
“The Left won sweeping control of the federal government in 1976, in the wake of Watergate, so a naive observer who believed in leftist sincerity would assume that they would move aggressively to root out the evil that had spread throughout the American military, intelligence services and government in general. It would be insane to leave lieutenants who started their careers committing war crimes on a “day-to-day basis” in the military so that 30 years later they could rise into the ranks of top generals.
“Instead, they dropped the war crimes allegations as quickly as they could and moved to protect people like John Kerry from prosecution from the many laws he’d broken.”
Officers like Dave #110 are just chips in the game, of no more intrinsic importance than Global Warming or Hating People Who Wear Ed Hardy.
It’s the Fungibility, Stupid.
