The GOP makes it official: they ARE the party of torture
Top GOP leaders put out a new ad embracing the Bush torture era, Gitmo, and all the other ways their former, failed president, disgraced this country. Watch:
What's shocking is that elected Republicans have now gone on the record as favoring torture, something that up until now, only their radio talking heads, bloggers and neocon "think tankers" have done out loud. Now we can officially call the Republican Party the Party of Torture. Meanwhile, a Republican lawyer makes the latest pro-torture case: waterboarding isn't torture because ... wait for it ... the detainee knows in advance that the interrogators aren't going to kill him (are you listening, Sean Hannity???) Seriously... Writes Daphne Eviatar in the Washington Monthly:
... in a recent conversation I had with Republican lawyer David Rivkin, a former Reagan and first Bush administration official and an outspoken supporter of the second Bush administration’s legal justifications for its interrogation tactics, Rivkin explained the sort of reasoning that former OLC lawyers Bybee, John Yoo and Steven Bradbury were employing.
Rivkin said the authorized “techniques” really didn’t rise to the level of torture or “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment,” as outlawed by the Convention Against Torture and the U.S. law implementing it, because none of the methods inflicted “severe physical or mental pain or suffering,” as the statute defines torture. One of the statute’s definitions of severe mental suffering, however, is the threat of imminent death. (As Spencer wrote here, Bybee himself wrote that waterboarding involves the threat of imminent death, although he still somehow concluded that it wasn’t torture.)
Well, Rivkin argued, waterboarding and those other techniques couldn’t have been torture, because despite the apparent threat, the detainees knew they weren’t going to get killed.
And how did they know that?
“Assuming even an average level of intelligence, you would have to be an idiot to think that they’re going to kill you,” Rivkin said. “So the fact that you’d be killed deliberately is not a plausible scenario.”
In other words, it's okay to torture someone, as long as they're smart enough to figure out that you're not actually going to kill them. ... huh??? Rivkin's evidence supporting his theory comes from a place you've actually got to read to believe: Soviet gulags. Seriously:
“I’ve read lots of memoirs of people languishing in gulags … One thing that emerges very clearly is actually how, despite their horribly grim circumstances, the prisoners actually welcomed interrogations. As a way to break the oppressive monotony of the cell or working conditions. So they always welcome even the most sadistic and unpleasant interrogators. And to the extent that you’re worried about being shot eventually, during interrogations you’re not worried about that. We’re all fairly rational beings, isn’t that a rational point?”
