A New Low

"Waterboarding is something of which every American should be proud," - Deroy Murdock, National Review.

Have you noticed that the pro-torture right has gone from saying that torture is abhorrent to saying that torture isn't occurring to saying that torture is not torture to now saying that torture is "something of which every American should be proud". And why not indeed? The Cheney logic is impregnable: the president is not bound by the law or the Geneva Conventions; torture reveals information that allows the government to seize individuals who might at some point commit terror attacks; the president's job is to prevent terror attacks. Torture is thereby a good. Alas, the American constitution clearly does not say that the president is above the law; the Geneva Conventions do apply to all captives in wartime and the bar on mistreatment far less than torture is clear; the only source we have for the fact that these terror suspects were terrorists is the government that uses torture against them; torture itself has no way of determining what is true or what is false and was designed in the first place to produce false confessions. And the president's first job is to uphold the Constitution.

Then, of course, there is the question of morality. But if you follow Murdock's reasoning that torture saves lives, and your moral rubric is entirely utilitarian, then torture itself is obviously an active moral good. I have no idea why more "conservatives" don't aggressively propose expanding it. And here's a prediction: after the next terror attack, they will.