Speaking of Unsound Methods

I'm in a bit of a bad mood, and this news doesn't really help matters: "Canadian intelligence officials passed false warnings and bad information to American agents about a Muslim Canadian citizen, after which U.S. authorities secretly whisked him to Syria, where he was tortured, a judicial report found Monday." But now here's the rub. Cooperating with Syria on our common interest in combatting Salafist terrorism seems like a very good idea to me. Certainly a much better idea than trying to provoke conflict with Syria by nonsensically lumping it in with some "Islamofascist" bogeyman. And yet, since the United States shouldn't be in the torture business, colluding with Syria in order to have people tortured is not the sort of cooperation we should be engaged in. That's my view, and it strikes me as a coherent one reflecting a standard liberal worldview. "Cooperation good; torture bad." Somehow, though, to the Bush administration we should cooperate with Syria only insofar as it once provided a convenient mechanism for the conduct of torture. That, it seems to me, is a truly deranged worldview.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2006/09/speaking-of-unsound-methods/39874/