Torture: Un-American & inefficient

I was reading the Daily News yesterday and read the most idiotic editorial. Entitled "Our man at the UN", its main purpose is to praise the work of (recess appointee) UN Ambassador John Bolton, calling his work a "delight". Ignoring that adjective, the paragraph that truly got me eyes rolling was about the U.S.'s use of torture (oops, sorry, we don't do that) as an interrogation tool. The editorial blows off this "this phony-baloney 'torture' business [which] continues to be a labored issue in some quarters of Europe". They dismiss the issue and even say we should "thank our lucky stars" the U.S. is willing to do anything to stop the "bad guys". Vice President Cheney, please let Mr. Zuckerman have his editorial page back.

I must confess to strongly disliking their editorial board. The editorials often come off ill-informed and very amateurish. And for a middle-of-the-road paper, their editorials often lean very conservative. They basically make most of the same points the Post's editorials do, except the News doesn't sound like Sean Hannity when they do it (for instance, the News today has jumped on board the War on Christmas bandwagon).

Still the idea of not only defending our "aggressive interrogation", but praising it, is very upsetting to me. The editorial writers simply come off as ignorant on the subject as Rush Limbaugh. Have any of the News editorial writers even fought in a war? Have they been subjected to "aggressive interrogation"? And, if so, did they find it worked for their enemies? And do they approve of us using these barbaric, and illegal, tactics in return?

Luckily for readers of the News, that same day an opinion column by Errol Louis ran on the opposite page. He gets the point and has a lot more knowledge and examples to back it up than the editorial board. Entitled "Un-American & inefficient", his column describes the "ducking, dodging and double-talk" the Bush administration has used to defend themselves on the torture issue. Louis also shakes his head at the fact that a slight majority in poll seem to favor its use.

Mostly, his column describes numerous examples to prove torture is ineffective, if not simply immoral. He uses the story of John McCain fooling his torturers in Vietnam by 'giving up' the names of the Green Bay Packers in substitute of his unit (hey, at least someone reads Newsweek). He also tells the stories of two other tortured POWs, Larry Chesley and Jack Bomar, who also lied to their captors. Louis didn't mention the alarming al-Libi example, but he made his point well enough. Furthermore, he gives the example of Israel, "where real ticking bombs go off with depressing regularity", which outlawed torture because it was useless. He concludes by stating "The administration will - and should - continue to get international condemnation until it comes clean on the question of the secret prison camps and publicly makes clear that torture, an unreliable and immoral practice, will not be practiced by American military or intelligence forces. Not ever."

Agreed. Tell it to Mortimer.