Maine Owl

A new season of the Fox torture romp, 24, premieres this evening

Via Atrios and Matthew Yglasias comes this observation:

under the leadership of a terrible president, our elites have become vociferous advocates of the goodness and rightness of war crimes and human rights violations

One of the references cited discussed Brit Hume's "41 & 43" interview on Fox News Sunday today.

Colonel W. Patrick Lang: torture a la Jack Bauer had been a good thing for the US government to employ because it had enabled the winkling out of information from "known killers," and at another point in his discourse "known criminals."

The problem is the president neatly has corrupted the foundations of human rights--namely the right to a fair trial and to be protected from the whims of a vindictive executive.

For his part, Vice President Richard B. Cheney graced The Beard's final Late Edition with this wisdom:

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: The fact of the matter is that we were able to persuade them to cooperate, to give us the intelligence we needed, and to give us the base of understanding about al Qaeda, about personnel and operations and financing and geography and so forth that was essential in terms of defending our country against further attacks. Now you don't go in and pull out somebody's toenails in order to get them to talk. This is not torture. We don't do torture.

WOLF BLITZER: John McCain says it's torture.

CHENEY: Well, John is wrong. He and I have a fundamental disagreement on this point. But what the agency did was they sought formal guidance from the senior leadership of the administration, as well as the Justice Department in terms of what was appropriate and what wasn't. And they got that guidance. And they followed that guidance, as far as I know. I have no reason to believe anybody out at the agency violated any tenet of the obligations and responsibilities we have in terms of statutes or our treaty obligations. I think it was done very professionally. I think it was done very few times, when it was necessary. I think it produced good results. I think there are Americans alive today because we used that technique on those three individuals.

BLITZER: And if necessary, would you authorize it again?

CHENEY: Well, I'm not in the chain of command, but if necessary, I would certainly recommend it again.

BLITZER: Waterboarding?

CHENEY: Yes.

I suppose Cheney has to state that the waterboarding he openly admits to supporting (note the careful ass-covering statement about his not being in the "chain of command," probably technically true) is not torture. If it is, those with their hands on it are wide open to war crimes charges. My opinion is the vice president richly deserves a space in the dock for a war crimes trial where this defense of his actions should receive at least as much consideration as Hussein and Milo?ević received in theirs.

Furthermore, we can attack Cheny, Bush, and other torture advocates on their own terms. The story of Ibn al Sheikh al Libi is instructive. Torture leads to bad information, bad decisions, unnecessary war, and catastrophic loss of life. In the case of al Libi, he was sent to Egypt where "they buried him alive and beat him mercilessly until he confessed that Iraq and Al Qaeda were linked." The bad information was then used countless times by Cheney and others to dupe the public into war.

One note on The Beard-- I give him credit for pressing Cheney on bad intelligence, in particular that provided by "Curveball."

Violations of the sort practiced by this administration and now shamelessly rationalized in its waning days are ingrained in our entertainment, namely shows like 24 and NCIS. I can't stand NCIS any more, even though it is a very well-made show. But I will tune into 24. It's like gaping at a highway wreck.