Pertinent to this discussion, Sullivan asks today:

To put it more bluntly: It seems to me that those who are making a fine distinction between “torture” and even waterboarding - and allowing waterboarding - have no logical basis for objecting to what we saw in many of the photographs at Abu Ghraib. Or rather their only objection must surely be that the techniques were not adequately professionalized and were allowed to leak, or were somehow inflicted by the wrong people. But the techniques were fine, right? We are at war, right?

And that gives us carte blanche.

Sullivan references this article from Andrew C. McCarthy in the National Review - the crux of whose argument is this:

The United States doesn’t do show-trials; we collect intelligence. We don’t want lies; we need the truth. We are not using torture to coerce phony confessions or intimidate dissenters; we are a besieged people using forcible methods — not torture — to cull from hardened terrorists, trained to resist interrogation, information that can be corroborated and used to defeat the enemy. We do it to protect American lives. We are not sadists. If forcible methods didn’t work, it would be pointless to use them, and we wouldn’t. Further, if there hadn’t been an imminent threat of more 9/11s — and recall that bin Laden, Zawahiri and their cohort have been promising a repeat performance ever since the first one — we’d have contented ourselves with more anodyne methods, for however many months it took, fully aware that these hardest cases would probably never talk.

What he’s saying is what’s echoed ad naueum around here: If we have to torture it’s OK, because look how moral and good we are. But again: Where is the line drawn? If indeed we are doing this to protect American lives, why in the world would we stop with waterboarding, when in fact there are other, more brutal methods of getting information - true or false - out of our adversaries. Might not utilizing such methods also, plausibly, save American lives?

So what’s permissable and what’s not? McCarthy - those who would excuse all this in general - like to pretend there is some line, drawn somewhere, that if we crossed they would not support it.

I simply think that’s false. I think they’d support anything - so long as they felt it “necessary.” Because - see above - we don’t do it for fun; we only do it because we must.

But McCarthy invokes the war - that would be the war on terror - in virtually every single paragraph. We must do these things because we’re at war; “a war can’t be fought under the peacetime protocols of the civilian-justice system.” But this is a war, we have specifically been told, that will last a generation or longer.

So shall we indeed institutionalize these “enhanced interrogation techniques?” If this war drags on as long as the Cold War - shall we utilize these methods over the course of 40 years? Shall this be policy?

The most telling aspect of McCarthy’s piece comes near the end:

Few in Congress and the commentariat complained when the mainstream media, reluctant to stoke public anger against Islamic radicals, made the video of the 9/11 attacks disappear. (When was the last time you saw it?)

One gets the sense McCarthy watches it several times a day - and would formulate policy on the basis of the panic of those terrible hours, when it seemed there could be no such thing as overreaction. We know now that there can be. And the long-term consequences, both political and in terms of the public relations nightmare he so abhors, of such an overreaction may ultimately be far more damaging than 9/11 itself.