President Obama has made a bold and impressive start to his tenure in the White House. He has had to address some glaring national and international injustices and imbalances - many economic, several strategic and a few simply moral. The last of these has centred most recently on the release of legal memos from 2002 which the Bush Administration used to permit the CIA and military to carry out 'advanced interrogation techniques' - that's Orwellian code for torture. (Incidentally the FBI instantly recognised what these brutal tactics amounted to and refused to follow them).
The lead figures in the Republican Party had the opportunity to disown this dispreputable and criminal episode. But Rove, Cheney (left) and Limbaugh have not only justified the techniques as 'effective' they often also deny, contrary to all evidence, they amount to torture at all. The memos themselves acknowledge the general style of interrogation sanctioned derives from Chinese techniques used during the Korean War which at time Eisenhower and Nixon called 'brainwashing.' During 1945-7 the US authorities prosecuted and imprisoned several Japanese commanders for allowing these exact methods of torture.
The Al-Quaida terrorist, Khalid Sheikh Mohamed was given waterboarding 183 times in a month, so on average six times daily. The reason given for such intensive 'questioning' was the failure of these 'operatives' to admit the (blindingly false) link between Al-Quaida and Sadam Hussein.
Former Judge Advocate General Wallach said, "waterboarding is often described as 'simulated drowning'... it is usually real drowning simulating death". Here Vanity Fair, journalist Christopher Hitchens, gets a taste for what it feels like.
Dick 'Lon' Cheney has been wandering the TV studios to declare the release of the memos can only be understood in two ways. First, the Obama administration believes the torture methods were ineffective; naturally he can show that's not the case. Alternatively, he says Obama and Clinton must believe the US is no longer be under threat, which makes them naive, stupid or perhaps sympathetic to the enemy's cause.
There is of course a third possiblity which is that Obama knows torture is morally wrong, is contrary to International Conventions and amounts to a serious criminal offence. Some of it, like in Abu Gharaib prison, wasn't even used for interrogation and can only be seen as an example of "recreational sadism" as Hitchens himself puts it.
Many of the right's commentators, like Fox News, have tried to take the traditional political opposition against anything advocated by those pinko liberals, but for some it is become a tense internal battle. These guys are invariably proud patriots and at times can't stop themselves revealing how dismayed they are about this obvious moral degradation of American values.
Sheperd Smith has been a news anchor on Fox since the channel was launched in 1996. In the clip below (includes expletives) he can be seen at first wrestling mentally with the justification of torture - then his usual geniality suddenly breaks with spectacular results.
Smith's colleague on Fox, Sean Hannity, has no such qualms and last week even volunteered to be waterboarded for charity, the money going to Army families. Those charities would be under huge pressure not to accept funds tainted by this shameful enterprise.
But clearly there is still plenty of room for breathtaking arrogance and crass insenstivity on the right even when the issue is torture. But for a few the moral principle is regaining prominence over the endless political gainsay.
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