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From Pine View Farm by Frank Bell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.pineviewfarm.net.
From Pine View Farm

Evil in Our Names. Again. Still. Or Something. 0

Apologists for torture are fond of invoking the “ticking time bomb”:

“What if [unnamed bad guys] had your [member of family] and you could save [him or her] by encasing said bad guy in an iron maiden? Well, huh, well, what do you say not, smart guy? So there! Nyah nyah nyah.”

(Granted, this example does give their argument a dignity and persuasiveness which it does not actually possess.l

Frank Rich in the Toimes cuts through the crap:

In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee’s memo was written the week after the then-secret (and subsequently leaked) “Downing Street memo,” in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” A month after Bybee’s memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on “Meet the Press,” hyping both Saddam’s W.M.D.s and the “number of contacts over the years” between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk.

But there were no links between 9/11 and Iraq, and the White House knew it. Torture may have been the last hope for coercing such bogus “intelligence” from detainees who would be tempted to say anything to stop the waterboarding.

Ultimately, no sophistry can render evil into good.

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April 27, 2009 | Posted by: Frank | Posted in: Republican Hypocrisy |

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