Torture is not a Right vs. Left Issue

Andrew Sullivan nails a disturbing aspect of the manner in which the torture issue is being debated in Washington and reported in the mainstream media on The Daily Dish.

One reason one begins to despair of the MSM is its inability to report an issue like the facts of the torture program. There are plenty of facts in the ICRC report, the OLC Memos and the Senate report. One of these facts is that waterboarding is torture under US domestic law, and this question has never been legally debatable until Dick Cheney decided he wanted to do it. There is no real genuine debate about this. Just because one person decides to say black is white does not make a debate; it makes that person merely a liar or delusional.

And so the MSM - Dan Balz is a useful pinata for Arianna - has to create a left vs right debate. It has to refer to "left-wing bloggers" as the only torture critics, as if it is somehow left-wing to accept the unanimous consensus of every American legal authority on waterboarding: that it is definitionally torture which is definitionally a war crime. Until Bush, no conservative in America, upon hearing that a captive had been waterboarded, would have hesitated for a second to call it torture. And yet now they leap as one to say it isn't.

Torture is far too serious an issue with legal, diplomatic, strategic and systemic political consequences for its discussion to devolve into the usual partisan shouting match. Yet that is precisely what is happening. This is a situation which cries out for sober, serious, thoughtful leadership.

--Ballard Burgher