The Torture Debate

It has come alive again - largely because of new revelations that the Bush administration lied to the Congress and the world by saying three years ago that such practices were abhorrent and no longer in operation. My two-pronged counter-argument to Bret Stephens' recent piece in the Wall Street Journal can be read here and here. Senator Clinton's strained words on the subject are dissected here. A plurality of Americans think the president is lying here.

(Photo: a Khmer Rouge waterboard, which the Wall Street Journal and Bret Stephens do not believe was an instrument of torture. It is, for some reason, in a museum dedicated to recording the history of torture techniques in Cambodia during the genocide. The Cambodians don't seem to understand that the Khmer Rouge were simply employing "enhanced interrogation," as practiced by the US under president George W. Bush.)