The editor of National Review is thrilled that torture will now continue with Congressional backing. What can I add? Notice how he uses C. S. Lewis' brilliant euphemism for what he favors: "coercive interrogation." By the way, I've been very clear from the beginning what I'm against: "no severe mental or physical pain or suffering," the clear legal definition of torture as proscribed by the Geneva Conventions, and followed by the U.S. for generations. Therefore: no "waterboarding", no "hypothermia", no "stress positions", no "long-time-standing." Nothing but actually good interrogation; and an intelligence effort that is the real thing: careful, long-term infiltration of terror networks, human intelligence, the NSA program (with court oversight). Torture is the lazy, brutal man's way of getting intelligence. And we have had few presidents as lazy or as callous as this one.
Lowry, of course, doesn't believe that what Stalin's thugs did to Solzhenitsyn in the Gulags was "torture". It was just one of many 'alternative methods". He doesn't believe that what the Japanese did to Americans in Singapore was "torture". It was all just "coercive interrogation." And fine by him. Isn't it amazing that that the most prominent moral relativists of our time are on what's left of the right?