To me, though, the big take away here is that the right is losing the torture debate. It started with “Dick Cheney was just keeping us safe from teh terrorists, don’t you libtards watch ‘24’?”. Then it became “mistakes were made, but it was a difficult time.” And now it’s “okay, maybe the whole thing was fucked up, but Pelosi knew about it so it’s her fault.” It’s just another variation on “Clinton did it too” and it’s essentially a defensive posture.I tend to think that this is true, but I don't think it means that the left is winning. At the very least, the left is keeping a coherent set of arguments while the right is flitting around, ADD-style, hoping to find the silver bullet that wins the debate for them. However, I think the left's focus on torture's effectiveness in gathering intelligence--which I think is dubious but to some extent unknowable--is not a strong one, because then it allows some Cheney-style circular reasoning, like, "Torture saved lives. I know this because I saw documents that said it did (that will never be released). They can't be released because they're vital to national security, therefore I'm right".
Not that we should just concede this part of the debate, but there are a lot of facts that are knowable. My argument would be something like this: torture is morally wrong. It is contrary to the spirit and custom of the United States, as well as to an ethic of valuing life, dignity, and human rights. From a religious standpoint, torturing people who are, like ourselves, formed in the image of God is unacceptable. From a legal standpoint, the techniques which we are discussing are not permissible, and the legal hackwork pressured by the office of the vice president shows obvious signs of insincerity and bad faith. From a practical standpoint, there is little evidence that torture produced much good information, and intensified our problems in the Middle East by providing a recruitment tool to our enemies. Torture, historically, has been abused by those who practiced it, and the same holds true with America's experiment in torture, in which the infamous "ticking time bomb" scenario was given as the justification but in reality torture was used to make the Administration's case for the Iraq War, and was done dozens of times on people who hadn't even been charged with a crime over a period of months, thus belying any notion that it was only used only in the "ticking time bomb" situation. And, if Laurence Wilkerson is to be believed, America managed to defend itself quite well for several years after 9/11 without torture. It is unnecessary, immoral, prone to abuse, of dubious effectiveness, illegal and fundamentally wrong.
I think this comprehensively states the case of why torture (even torture-light) is wrong. The case for why torture is right is predicated almost solely on one particular hypothetical that isn't known to have happened. Now, because 24 is portrayed so vividly I think we may be dealing with an availability heuristic sort of situation, and if that's the case we should be leading with the "dozens of times" argument and the Iraq connection, but I think that all of this adds up to a good case against torture. I'm not sure why Democrats aren't blitzing the television screens mocking Dick Cheney, asking why you'd trust this man about anything, and making a similar case against torture. My guess is that the Democrats still lack a slick media operation to disseminate Democratic arguments (while the Republicans have the media operation down pat), and that a lot of actual Democrats are more complicit in this stuff than we'd like to believe. I don't think that should stop them, though: when a thrice-divorced born-again Catholic is allowed to earnestly paean to traditional marriage, anything's possible.
