The shame it's plain is it isn't us, but Spain.

I know O'Reilly isn't going to spend his tourism dollar on tapas and sweet wine in a rather lovely country bcause he's miffed that one of those new "Old European" countries (new, because they were for us before they were against us) has taken the initiative in trying to decide if American offcials are responsible for war crimes. And it's entirely his loss, because, for starters, Spain is fantastic, and I so would want to vacation there my soonest opportunity, funds permitting, and because our officials seriously did facilitate the United States' going into the torture business. I'll let Rachel Maddow break down the particulars:




Here's the thing that bothers me--George W. Bush said, "We do not torture." He at least grasped that at some fundamental level, the idea of torture was noxious, and it would in no way be salutory for the US to embrace it. He just wanted to find a definition of it that still let a little torture get done. Things like waterboarding--it doesn't leave bruises on the outside, where people can see. Stress postions. Sleep deprivation--how could they be tortured if there's no marks? He meant to preserve the illusion that it wasn't torture.

And there's some people out there defending it who just don't give a shit.

The genocidal regime of the Khmer Rouge is on trial right now. Culturally, we can admit waterboarding is torture when they did it. Cheney admits waterboarding was used--how is it not torture when we do it?

Bill O'Reilly and Dennis Miller can joke about torture as a theme park and Governor Jindal can joke about his rebuttal speech not being legal to be shown to prisoners at Gitmo--as if tacitly saying "there are things so harsh even Gitmo won't tolerate them." Leaving open that there's things harsh as harsh can be that they consider "just right."

It's defended, and even not particularly honestly defended, by people who still want to pretend Abu Zubayda only gave up Padilla (who we also gave a hard way to go) after the "enhanced interrogation techniques." If so, then good for Padilla. He should be a free man, because all the information they picked him up on was tainted. But I don't even know that that is true.

Let's kick out the legs of this stool--this three-legged foundation for why torture was acceptable:

1) Because it's legal--

It isn't.

2) Because it's moral if it saves lives.

The ends don't justify the means.

3) Because it works.

And it doesn't even work.

The only purposes left are retribution, and to hope it does come out that we torture, to make an example "pour discourager les autres." Abu Ghraib pictures serve the effect of heads displayed on a pike. The stupid, unfunny, unironic, coda to which is--they aren't afraid of that.

Saddam had rape rooms. He fucked people up. There isn't a country where Al-Qaeda is recruited you couldn't have found at least as bad, whether government-sponsored or not. So what effect should it have had on them to discourage anything? And predictably, why would it ever have yielded better information faster? Just like picking someone up as a suspect doesn't make them the right guy; torturing somebody doesn't somehow make them know things they don't know.

The bottom line is that this was an amazingly dumb and cruel tactic, and the smart guys who looked the law and their president full in the face and said, "Why not?" may still have spotless, blood-free manicures, but that doesn't mean they aren't culpable. They are.

It's just a shame we have to hear it from another country. It's a shame too many in this country don't understand it themselves.