In our name
Dick Cheney, notorious will-o’-the-constitutional-wisp, would like to see classified documents made public, so long as they confirm the effectiveness of Bush-era torture. The Gabfest has noted that there’s a delicious element to the man who wouldn’t turn over his doodles to the archivist now taking this position. But the New Yorker’s Philip Gourevitch perfectly articulates the deeper fallacy of this debate; perhaps the thinking person’s version of the Sheppard Smith outburst I linked last week. Here’s Gourevitch on the Political Scene:
What if [the interrogation method] works but it happens to be a crime? It’s effective to assassinate people. They’re dead and they’re no longer a problem. I would just say the effectiveness debate is a false debate. I think the effectiveness debate is a sort of cloud that Cheney’s trying to cast over it and he’s trying to keep the debate very much also on this idea of “We did this to those terrorists…”
Slowly what’s changing is that we’re starting to realize that when we commit torture, it’s something we’re doing to us. When you look back five years ago at the Abu Ghraib pictures, everybody said, “Wow, why are our soldiers doing those things to those people?” But the important question, too, is why are we doing that to our soldiers – turning them into torturers? Why are we doing that to our nation? Why is this what we’re doing to our laws? Why is this what we’re doing to our political institutions and our standing in the world? And I think that that’s a debate that Dick Cheney knows perfectly well he’s lost catastrophically and cannot win on any grounds.
EDIT: Gourevitch’s above quote appears to have been a rought draft of a Comment piece that ran in the magazine two weeks later. You can read that piece here.
