Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan powerfully opines on American torture and slams the media and political elites for looking the other way. Welcome to US exceptionalism:
The descent of the United States – and of Americans in general – to lower standards of morality and justice than those demanded by Iranians of their regime is a sign of the polity’s moral degeneracy. Compare these two stories today. Item One:
“The charges of rape and torture have struck directly at the moral and religious authority the nation’s theocratic leaders claim. The government initially denied Mr. Karroubi’s charges, and the speaker of Parliament, Ali Larijani, said a review had proved they were baseless.
“But Mr. Karroubi has refused to back down even as clerics and military leaders aligned with the government have called for his arrest. Faced with public disgust and outrage, the Parliament agreed to review his evidence. A parliamentary committee met with Mr. Karroubi on Monday. One member, Kazem Jalili, told Iranian news agencies that Mr. Karroubi had said that four people told him they had been raped.”
You will notice once again that the New York Times is able to use the word “torture” to describe torture – but only when it is committed by governments other than that of the US. The NYT under the editorial guidance of Bill Keller has, by cowardice and weakness, abetted the degeneracy that Cheney accomplished. Every time the NYT uses a different standard to judge foreign and American torture, it undermines the core moral basis of liberal democracy. And if the NYT cannot stand firm, what chance someone like Pete King? Here he is, responding to acts that included murder, rape, sexual abuse and torture conducted by the CIA under the command of George W. Bush:
“When Holder was talking about being ‘shocked’ [before the report’s release], I thought they were going to have cutting guys’ fingers off or something – or that they actually used the power drill,” he said. Pressed on whether interrogators had actually broken the law, King said he didn’t think the Geneva Convention “applies to terrorists,” and that the line between permitted and outlawed interrogation policies in the Bush years was “a distinction without a difference.”
“Why is it OK to waterboard someone, which causes physical pain, but not threaten someone and not cause pain?” he asked, warning of a “chilling” effect on future CIA behavior.”
King is right, of course, that the difference between what Bush authorized and the new revelations is non-existent. There is no moral or legal distinction between subjecting someone to 960 hours of sleep deprivation (as Bush did to Qahtani), or slamming people against walls, of freezing them to near-death, or murdering them by stress position … and threatening to murder someone’s kids or stage a mock execution. But King then draws the inference that all of it is fine, as long as it cannot be portrayed in the tabloids as literally drilling through a detainee’s skull. (He seems unaware that this would actually kill someone, not torture them.)
But King is not alone in believing that the US should be less restrained by moral qualms than Iranians demand of their own illegitimate regime. Indeed, much of the American people, especially evangelical Christians, expect less in terms of human rights from their own government than Iranians do of theirs’. In fact, American evangelicals are much more pro-torture in this respect than many Iranian Muslims.