There were few spectacles in the past decade more disturbing than the way virtually the entire Republican Party and conservative movement became such gleeful supporters of torture. They didn't say that it was a moral compromise, but the stakes were so high we had no choice. Instead, they were positively lusting for it, sitting in their comfortable offices and imagining themselves to be Jack Bauer, heroically beating the truth out of some swarthy terrorist and defusing the ticking time bomb.
Having divested themselves of anything resembling human morality, they seem to have narrowed their minds so dramatically that some literally cannot imagine how you would interrogate a suspect without torturing him. I give you Liz Cheney, a former midlevel State Department functionary, who for some reason (I'm not sure what it is, but her name sounds familiar for some reason) keeps getting invited on Sunday shows to say things like this:
It seems to me the key question now is, we've got this trove of intelligence, what looks to have been perhaps the biggest trove we've ever been able to get a hold of. If that leads us to other Al Qaida operatives, it's not clear to me that we have any way to effectively interrogate them. We don't have enhanced interrogation anymore. We read people their Miranda rights. We are not detaining people at Guantanamo anymore. We're not detaining people in the secret prison sites. It's not clear to me what the administration will be able to do to get this information.
Wondering what to do with a suspect if you can't torture him, Cheney is stumped. I mean, what are we supposed to do -- talk to him? Ask him questions? It's not as though we have people trained in interrogation or anything. It's not as though police detectives and military interrogation professionals have any experience getting suspects to talk. If we can't torture him, we're powerless!
