Define Conservatives vs. Liberals

Monday, November 28, 2005

Paul Mirengoff is a Torturist Apologist 

Paul Mirengoff honestly - I'm not making this up - makes a pro-torture argument on his site, claiming that McCain doesn't know the value of torture while Dick Cheney does! You can't make this stuff up.



Power Line: Cheney or McCain, who is the hero?: "McCain is fond of asserting that you can't get reliable information through torture. In doing so, he relies on his experience in North Vietnam. However, the ineffectiveness of the crude tactics of his prison guards of 40 years ago does not demonstrate that the tactics available to us today are ineffective. In fact, it appears that our tactics worked well with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. If they didn't work, why would Vice President Cheney and our top military leaders be so insistent on not taking them off the table. Surely McCain does not buy into the notion that Cheney takes the position he does because he is evil. In fact, as noted above, McCain's position isn't really that different from Cheney's. It's just that Cheney is willing to take the heat for defending tactics that will save lives. In this instance, Cheney, not McCain, is the American hero."

Is it really honest to suggest that the ONLY data McCain has used to back his anti-torture position was what he learned in North Vietnam? How laughable is that?

Mirengoff has to completely ignore the justifications behind the Geneva Convention to draw the conclusions he does. That's one flying leap away from common sense and decency, and completely ignores the rationalle that our troops are more at risk of being tortured if we use torture tactics against our POWs.

Mirengoff also uses our apparent successful torturing of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to make his case. One question: If that revealed such valuable information, where's Osama Bin Laden.

We haven't heard much about Bin Laden from the pro-torture White House lately, have we?