TORTURE ROUNDUP….Some good points from around the blogosphere about the torture “compromise” spearheaded by John McCain:
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TPM reader JO: True, torture has always gone on “in the shadows”….[but] when the bill becomes law, it will be America’s official policy for professional CIA interrogators to use torture. And it will be perfectly legal. Period. We are not even remotely returning to the status quo.
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TPM reader JC: Right now, CIA are the bad guys. As far as I know, military interrogators were not using “coercive techniques.” However, if this bill passes, military interrogators will not only be ALLOWED to use them, they will be EXPECTED to use them. Which is one reason so many military people have come out against it.
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Charles Pierce: The national Democratic Party is no longer worth the cement needed to sink it to the bottom of the sea. For an entire week, it allowed a debate on changing the soul of the country to be conducted intramurally between the Torture Porn and Useful Idiot wings of the Republican Party….It contributed nothing. On the question of whether or not the United States will reconfigure itself as a nation which tortures its purported enemies and then grants itself absolution through adjectives ? “Aggressive interrogation techniques” ? the Democratic Party had…no opinion.
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Juliette Kayyem: Marty [Lederman] and others are commenting on the wiggle room left to the President in determining what methods would be prohibited but may not constitute grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions….It is this concession to the President that is mindboggling in almost all respects because the hold-outs could have given the President the less than grave tactics without giving him the sole authority to determine what they were. I’m eating my words; Marty is right ? McCain is a tragic figure now.
