Torture Blurbs

Dahlia Lithwick (via that same post) quotes Felix Frankfurter giving a line I very much like. He discusses those who "afford brutality the cloak of law." The quote comes from Rochin v. California [342 U.S. 165, 173 (1952)]. The case there involved police officers forcibly trying to extract drug capsules from a suspect's mouth, then after he swallowed him, applying a stomach pump to force him to vomit them up. This case is also where the phrase "shocks the conscience" entered our legal lexicon. The type of techniques President Bush wants to preserve for his use are the epitome of what should shock the conscience, and I certainly hope our collective conscience has not atrophied so much so that it no longer does.

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Andrew McCarthy calls anti-torture Senators "anarchronisms." Publius has another idea of what truly constitutes an anarchronism.

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Representative Peter King (R-NY)--one of the few representatives who can fairly be said to have explicitly supported terror and terrorists--has had a change of heart. But so far, the progressive turn that leads him to believe that wanton depravations of human dignity (such as terrorism) are bad has yet to cause him to turn against torture as an interrogation tactic. In somewhat related news, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, sums up the extent of his inquiry on this issue: "We'll do what the President wants." That's GOP oversight.

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Brian Tamanaha: Don't make a deal with the devil. Some temporary security is not worth sacrificing our nation's immortal soul.

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Finally, a TPM Reader nails it: It really doesn't matter who ends up winning the torture debate. By virtue of having it, we've already lost. This isn't about censorship. This is about there being some redlines in our moral psyche which we shoul refuse to even consider, much less cross. If someone offered you a considerable sum to sell your children into slavery, the proper response isn't to deliberate over the offer, weigh the pros and cons, and come to a decision--even if that decision is "hell no!" There is a type of moral sacrifice in even debating the subject, regardless if one holds the line on the right outcome.