The Dog is all about progress, so when progress on an issue like torture, however small it is, happens, the Dog is always trying to look down the road and see what will be the next step or counter step. This week with the very public and very limited waterboarding of Mancow (a conservative radio shock jock) and his admission that even his sanitized and safe version was indeed torture; the Dog thinks we should talk about one of the next memes you are likely to hear about from the torture apologists.  

Yesterday a good thing happened, one of the Conservative talk radio torture apologists had himself waterboarded and after six seconds of it he was ready to call it what it is, torture, pure and simple. The Dog thinks this is a good first step, but we are not at the level where people realize how bad it is. What the Mancow had done to him was superficially like the waterboarding torture that we inflicted on Abu Zabaydah and Khalid Sheik Mohamed but it was in no way the full blow thing.  

Well it seems like there is more evidence that Speaker Pelosi for all her failings is not actually complicit in the Bush era State Sponsored Torture program. Zach Roth of the Talking Points Memo Muckraker section has found a former Intel official who points out that the Orwellian euphemism of “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” was only coined in 2006 when the Bush administration started to get worried (sensibly) that their war crimes would come back to haunt them. You can find the whole article here.

The Dog has talked about the downward spiral of the Republican party but until yesterday it was all based on gut feeling and perceptions of their actions filtered through a lifetime of political thinking and work. Now Gallup has come out with some data which confirms not just that the Gopasaurs are in trouble but that they are in trouble in every single demographic!  

The Dog is off at a week of training so the intent was not to post this week. However there are times when the need to speak out clearly against something as heinous as torture overrides the best of intentions.

This is going to be short and to the point. This week we are seeing Lynn Cheney and other torture apologists trotting out the most extreme of ticking time bomb scenarios. So, at the risk of being very short (a rarity for the Dog) here is the meat of this dairy:

If I had Khalid Sheik Mohammed in custody, and there was reason to believe that he knew of a plot that would surely kill the Dog’s family, his Mom, Step Dad, Sisters, Wife, Nephews and Niece, the Dog would NOT order him tortured.  This is true even if there were any evidence that torture would work. This is true even if the Dog were to be included in the list of people who would surely die.

Everyone loves their family, everyone loves their lives and would like to have it continue, but it is not an unreasoning desire. There are, in fact things which are more important them my family, or even my life. One of them is the idea that our nation has a set of ideals we will hold to, even in the face of extreme danger. This is an ideal which inspires the Dog to public service, even though it is a job the public rarely thanks you for. If you will not live up to your ideals in the face of extreme adversity, then they are not ideals, they are merely luxuries you will abandon whenever it becomes to hard.

This is what the Torture Apologists are saying. They do not care to have any character, they have no resolve, and they will abandon any pretense of ethics or morality out of fear, and do it instantly.

Now, the Dog does not expect everyone to feel the same way he does. Even on a Liberal blog like this there will be those who would value their family over the ideals of their nation. This is understandable, how lucky for all of us that this scenario which the Torture Apologists trot out is in no way close to reality. There is no way to know if the person you hold would have the information which would prevent the attack they describe. There is no way to if the information you tortured out of them would be accurate or would send your resources in the wrong directions. There is, in fact, no way to know accurately enough that there would be an attack to make this pretense of justifying torture. It is a silly fallacy which is thrown up to try to put those of us who will not sanction torture in a box.

The thing is, for the Dog, there is no box.

The floor is yours.