Eventually, even Godwin will be repealed

In a just universe the LCDs at the National Review offices would be splattered with grey matter right about now, as their brains try, and fail, to sort out who the bad guys in all this are:

WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

I can't help but think of Jonah Goldberg's reaction to someone suggesting he read The Gulag Archipelago:

I've read the Gulag Archipelago. It didn't tell me everything I needed to know about torture, it told me almost everything I needed to know about the evil of the Soviet Union. And, guess what? The comparison between the United States and the Soviet Union is idiotic and slanderous. Our recent experience on waterboarding proves exactly that.

It's true: comparing the US and USSR is idiotic and slanderous.  Comparing the US to Mao-era Communist China, it turns out, is factually unimpeachable.

Comments

[Joe Klein's conscience]

I wonder what Doughy Pantload will write tomorrow morning. Does anyone hear have his email so everyone can email it to him?

[joel hanes]

The US-as-torturer didn't start with Guantanamo Bay, nor with the SERE documents.
The School of the Americas trained select US military and thousands of our western-hemisphere proxies in torture and terrorism techniques starting in 1946, and at Fort Benning Georgia from 1984 to 1991. (That's under every American President from Truman on, for those of you keeping score.) Extraordinary rendition is not a Bush innovation. And the Reagan-era "contras" were not altogether scrupulous about means and ends.

So as a nation, we've been hypocrites since WW II, until George W. Bush decided to forgo the pretense of morality and to openly declare that our official policy is to torture anyone we feel like if it seems useful to the President. I give Mr. Bush considerable credit for publicly advocating and fighting for this policy, instead of saying one thing and doing another. It is rare that evil is rendered so visible.

[low-tech cyclist]

I'm old enough to have grown up on tales of brave Americans heroically withstanding such techniques. It was clear from those tales just who the good guys and bad guys were, and why.

Still is.