I'm heartened that we're having a national conversation about torture right now. The very fact that it's sucking up so much oxygen for such a long period of time (relatively speaking, as far as the news media's attention span is concerned) is reassuring; we may have been right, we may have been wrong, but we sure as hell aren't going to move on until we've muddied our paws in a good fight, and rightly so.I like to think of myself as anti-torture -- but then again, so does George W. Bush. It's hard to find one's soul in this debate, the vernacular has been so badly mangled. I count myself among the many who believe we should look at the evidence and then try to come to some kind of consensus, but on what? Did the enhanced interrogation techniques give us any useful information that we couldn't have otherwise obtained? Yes? No? Maybe? No way to tell? Until we get that part squared away, the rest is just a pie-in-the-face political farce.
Speaking of which, lately we've been treated to a fête en abondance vis-à-vis the amusement-park-like smear campaign on Nancy Pelosi over her non-objections to interrogation techniques in 2002. Apparently we're going to make Madam Speaker the focal point of the right's furor over the furor over torture, and I'm not afraid to confess that it makes less sense the more I think about it. (It is a farce after all, I suppose.)
We are now dealing with a whole new level of absurdity; one of the tools torture apologists love to use is the reminder that the interrogation policies put in place were done so in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. "We weren't ourselves, you see..." "What looks one way from a clear April day in 2009, blah blah blah..."
But this tool cuts two ways. Apparently it's OK to rush to the defense of the Bush lawyers who penned these opinions in the aftermath of 9/11, but quite another to rush to the defense of a Congresswoman from California. Somehow she is exempt from this allowance. She should have known better. The rest of us were just swept away in the passion of the moment.
Talk about a red herring.If we're going to have a debate about torture, let's have a debate about torture. I agree that Ms. Pelosi's apparent inconsistency is troubling, but is she really at the center of the issue? I'm inclined to agree in part with President Obama; the part about letting go of the past and just being more careful in the future is very appealing to me. The problem is, we can't seem to agree with each other (and ourselves?) that what we did was wrong in the first place.
("Don't look over there! Don't think about that! Isn't it fun to make fun of Nancy Pelosi? Let's to do that instead! Boo, Nancy Pelosi!")
Ahem. Gladly, the Bush/Cheney days are finally over. Congressional Democrats are one court ruling away from a filibuster-proof majority. The neocons (what's left of them) can stamp and stammer and rant and rave on television all they want, but guess who doesn't run this country anymore? Being GOP isn't so cool nowish. Indeed, only 21% of Americans self-identify as republicans today. Do they make up for it by screaming more loudly?
I think it's going to be fine to just watch the squabble-fest play out on CNN and MSNBC and Fox, etc. But then, after the last harrumph is had on television, Obama & Co will have the last word. What we did may or may not have been morally repugnant, but it probably won't happen again while an adult is minding the store, and thank heaven for that.
