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On Torture: The Will Of The People

By Big Tent Democrat

pResponding to a href="http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/12/in-defense-of-t.html"Reuel Marc Gerecht's defense/a of his pro-torture position, a href="http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2008/12/torture.html#comments"Kevin Drum writes/a:/p blockquoteSadly, I suspect that Gerecht is right: if torture had been put to a vote back in 2001, it would have passed. The language would have been prettied up, of course, but the intention would have been clear enough and the public would have approved. Even today, I'm pretty sure that a majority of Americans are basically OK with torture as long as it's mostly kept out of sight and they can go about their business./blockquote pDrum begs the question - since no such vote took place, torture remained illegal. And of course, if an open vote was held - torture could not have been "kept out of sight." The United States would have had to opt out of the UN Convention on Torture and repeal its codification of the Convention. Would we as a people have approved of this when forced to say "we approve of torture?" I do not know, but the illegality, indeed, the criminality, of what occurred remains manifest. In our names. The stain will never be removed./p pSpeaking for me only/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/TalkleftThePoliticsOfCrime?a=FWro2PxG"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/TalkleftThePoliticsOfCrime?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/TalkleftThePoliticsOfCrime?a=DO8MKY9c"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/TalkleftThePoliticsOfCrime?d=43" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/TalkleftThePoliticsOfCrime?a=XYV7yh34"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/TalkleftThePoliticsOfCrime?i=XYV7yh34" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/TalkleftThePoliticsOfCrime?a=YnsvXxgW"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/TalkleftThePoliticsOfCrime?d=50" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/TalkleftThePoliticsOfCrime?a=Ta4Q17A3"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/TalkleftThePoliticsOfCrime?d=52" border="0"/img/a /div

Full post as published by TalkLeft on December 17, 2008 (boomark / email).