Outsourcing Torture

Sunday's New York Times featured an op-ed piece by one Reuel Marc Gerech proudly defending the use of torture, wonderfully styled as "pain inflicting soliciting techniques."  (Isn't this what one might face with a particularly persistent Mary Kay agent?)  He posits that the only alternative to this is to subcontract the torture to our less squeamish friends in the third world -- think of Damascus as Bangalore with genital electrodes.  (It does not occur to Mr. Gerech that torture may not only be immoral, but also ineffective.)

According to Mr. Gerech, absent either torture or rendition, the Obama administration will inevitably face the "ticking time bomb" scenario, leading to mass casualities due to the moral fastidiousness of us liberals.   

I read it in disbelief -- not that this clown wrote it -- we all know that Republicans in their post 9-11 piss- your-pants phase have lost any shred of decency they once had -- but that the Times would publish such dreck.

Listen Reuel, many of us are willing to take a chance on living with a government that neither tortures nor outsources torture.  And I live right in DC, not some red state backwater.   Yglesias also takes on this steaming pile of crap.    

Comments

[Delicious Pundit]

If we called it "pain inflicting soliciting system," and then made it an acronym, that would reflect my general opinion of pro-torture advocates.

[Sir Charles]

DP,

I am so pissed that I didn't notice that.

[oddjob]

Don't you just love how tall and bravely they stand until it actually matters, and then their response to the New Hampshire motto ("Live free or die") is, "ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND???? WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO BE FREE?????????????"

[drip]

This guy Gerecht was all over the tv and radio early on in the neo-con war. He was wrong about everything, of course. He used to work at (where else?) AEI. Now he's at some fictional place called Foundation for the Defense of Democracy whose leadership consisits of Steve Forbes, Louis Freeh, Newt Gingrich, Max Kampleman, Bill Kristol, Joe Lieberman, Bud McFarlane and James Woolsey. I am a tolerant man and would love to have dinner with these folks (not all at once) but I wouldn't let any of them lead me to a seat at the multi-plex. These are the people who lead us here, at least with respect to foreign policy. Aach!

I thought Gerecht had been decent enough to just go away. He wrote an idiotic 68 page pamphlet, which his "publisher" AEI called a book in which Gerecht claimed: Those who have hated the United States most—Shiite clerics and Sunni fundamentalists—hold the keys to spreading democracy among the faithful. They, not the much-admired Muslim secularists, will probably liberate the Muslim Middle East from its age-old reflexive hostility to the West. Paradoxically, those who in their souls have felt the clash of civilizations most painfully will be our salvation from future 9/11s. I personally find the phrase "much beloved muslim secularists" to be a great example of the layers of stupidity floating round in this fellow's brain. Besides Sadaam Husein, which moslems are secularists? Chalabi? Which are the leaders and who loves them? Do they really hate the West more than the Baathists? Well at least we only had to wait until a year before it was published to see how stupid it was.

The NY Times was irresponsible in giving this guy a mention, let alone space in which to peddle his idiocy. If he really was an operative in the Directorate of Operations, or even on the switchboard at the guard station on the way in to Langley, its no wonder we got so much so wrong.

[Lisa Simeone]

I had missed this on Sunday. Should I say thank you for bringing it to my attention? Or is it just one more cause for my spleen to inflate over the viciousness, myopia, and sheer stupidity of the neocons?

"Pain-inflicting soliciting techniques"???

These people are beyond the pale. They out-Orwell Orwell over and over and over and over again. They have been doing it for 8 years, yet they continue.

And I am so sick of this specious "ticking-bomb" argument. Anyone with an ounce of logic in their brain who gets their ideas from rational thought instead of episodes of "24" knows this is a specious argument. And still they trot it out at every opportunity.

Interesting that the NYT did not provide a Comments section for this piece of shit; maybe they were afraid of crashing their server. And there are no Letters-to-the-Editor about it yet. But in the end, I'm glad they published it. We need to know what the neocons are thinking and saying, and we need to know how they are saying it. Its exhibition in stark black and white only shows how shameless and feeble they really are.

[Sir Charles]

I am not sure thanks are in order.

These clowns really do think Jack Bauer is a real life character.