January 19, 2005 - How much torture is permissible to extend the blessings of liberty to the huddled masses yearning to breathe free? Waterboarding seems to be permitted – at least permissible if used by the CIA against aliens overseas. Stacking naked and hooded detainees up for the cameras apparently crosses the line if you are a Reserve MP non-com. Beyond Waterboarding we don’t know how much torture is permitted because, as Alberto Gonzalez told the Senate today in his written response to questions, if we say what interrogation techniques we consider to be torture then the enemy will know what torture is and that may strengthen their anti-interrogation training to resist it.

We used to know what torture was. That was when THEY were the torturers and we decried the use of torture on humane and moral grounds. THEY were the Nazi supermen of the SS and the Gestapo. THEY were the Godless Communists of the KGB in the USSR behind the Iron Curtain. WE were the moral people dedicated to a nation Under God. What degree of torture is it that God tells us is godly?

But that was then and this is now. We have broken the chains of naïve morality that bound us when we were engaged in struggle against Nazi brutality. We are no longer restrained from emulating the techniques employed in the bowels of the Kremlin. We have matured and out-grown our child-like insistence that America must act better than do its enemies. We have freed ourselves from quaint and outdated morality so that we may meet our foes on their own terms. We are beyond an eye for an eye. We have set ourselves free to demand two for one.

It is not significant that we spend tens of millions chasing chimeras at Terror Level Orange based upon the blurted confessions that the Grand Inquisitor wanted to hear. We need that “intelligence” extracted by pain and pressure – even if it is wrong. What is significant is that the quaint and outdated ideas that we used to hold as sacred have been jettisoned and replaced by the new morality of expediency.

The cold logic of Attorney General Designate Gonzalez suggesting that at once America can authorize some torture while remaining committed to the humane treatment of detainees defines a new standard of conduct. We are permitted the use of humane torture; that degree of pressure and pain that is humanely applied. It is a logic that is coldly tortured.