America and Torture

Okay. Okay. One more...

Andrew Sullivan has been coming down hard on the Bush administration for its authorization of torture for a few months now. You can read his devastating piece on some of the similarities in techniques used by the Nazi regime and those Bush has endorsed (they used the phrase "enhanced interrogation techniques" too).

Today he responds to the New York Times piece on the DoJ memo which has just come to light and clearly states that torture is okay. Sullivan is understandably livid as all Americans should be.

There is no doubt - no doubt at all - that these tactics are torture and subject to prosecution as war crimes. We know this because the law is very clear when you don't have war criminals like AEI's John Yoo rewriting it to give one man unchecked power. We know this because the very same techniques - hypothermia, long-time standing, beating - and even the very same term "enhanced interrogation techniques" - "verschaerfte Vernehmung" in the original German - were once prosecuted by American forces as war crimes. The perpetrators were the Gestapo. The penalty was death. You can verify the history here.

We have war criminals in the White House. What are we going to do about it?

Is this the kind of country we want? I almost feel ashamed not only that it is happening in my country, but that so many people seem to not really care because it just happens to non-whites and it supposedly keeps us "safe."

Some things shouldn't be compromised.