Jonah and the Wail

Jonah Goldberg is an editor at the National Review. I'm pretty sure that he gets to keep his job there because of his ability to butter up the boss/founder ...

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"When confronted by the assertion that the Soviet Union and the United States were moral equivalents, William F. Buckley Jr. responded that if one man pushes an old lady in front of an oncoming bus and another man pushes the old lady of the way of a bus, we should not denounce them both as men who push old ladies around."
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Goldberg goes on to throw Time Magazine's Andrew Sullivan under the bus as being soft on national security when he (Sullivan) dares to oppose our tactics in dealing with "high value" terrorists:

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The tactic (comparing Chimpy's administration to Stalinist Russia) hasn't worked, partly because many decent Americans understand that abuse intended to foil a murder plot is not the same as torturing political dissidents...(t)he sole aim (of waterboarding Khalid Shaikh Mohammed) was to stop an ongoing murder conspiracy, which is what Al Quaeda is...
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By linking our current "war on turr" to our moral superiority during the Cold War, Mr. Goldberg sees a useful entry into a defense of torture (nicely hidden in asking that our political leaders "discuss" the issue). Of course there are a couple of problems here:
First, we're not at "war" at all, and second, even when we tettered on the brink of nuclear devastation, we didn't publicly contemplate torture nor rendered for torture, our enemies - perceived or otherwise. Apparently, godless communists were higher on the food chain than today's "IslamoFascists."

In case you think I'm being unfair or alarmist, look at Goldberg's reasoning:

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"In every society, murder is punished more harshly than non-lethal torture... even if I beat you for hours with a rubber hose, my punishment will be less than if I murder you, simply because it is worse to take a life than to cause pain... Yet according to the torture prohibitionists, there must be a complete ban on anything that even looks like torture, regardless of CONTEXT, even though we'd never dream of a blanket ban on killing."
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I may be wrong here, but doesn't it seem to you that Goldberg is trying to justify torture as being morally superior to, oh -- MURDER???

You think maybe I have misunderstood him? Read on:

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The law recognizes a host of nuances when it comes to homicide... but there is no equivalent word for murder when it comes to torture. It's always evil. Yet that's not our universal reaction. In movies and on TV, good men force evil men to give up information via methods no nicer than what the CIA is allegedly employing. If torture is a categorical evil, shouldn't we boo Jack Bauer on Fox's "24"?
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Look Jonah, using a fictional TV show is all well and good, but how about this: if these "good men" should be portrayed torturing INNOCENT people, are we allowed to boo then, or do we simply shrug our shoulders and say that the ends justify the means?
You seem to indicate as much when you go on to state "calling aggressive interrogation techniques 'torture' when they're not doesn't make such techniques any worse (than aggressive)."

And I'm really surprised that you didn't go back to "Dirty Harry" and use that fictional example... here let me refresh your memory. Harry Callahan is hot on the trail of a psychopathic twisted little fuck who calls himself "Scorpio." Well, he's been wreaking havoc upon the innocent citizenry of San Francisco, tweaking Harry's nose all the while. Scorpio's latest crime is the kidnapping of an innocent young girl. He sends a gruesome missive informing the police that he's buried the girl alive with only a short supply of oxygen. Harry - through dint of investigation (and a little luck) - tracks down the evil Scorpio, wings him with a shot from his
.45 and proceeds to grind his shoe into Scorpio's wounded shoulder until he presumedly (offscreen) gives up the location of the kidnapped girl. In the next scene, a body bag is shown being carried off (presumedly holding the kidnapped girl's body).

Now here's where it gets interesting. Our next scene finds Harry in a D.A.'s office, where he's told that nearly everything he did was unconstitutional. Scorpio gets to walk. Harry can't question a suspect without "Mirandizing" that suspect. He can't grind his shoe heel into a wound in order to extract vital information - that's torture -- EVEN if his action is done with the intent of saving a life.

Perhaps Harry should have waterboarded him...

How about this for beginning the discussion Jonah. Let's allow the CIA to test these aggressive techniques on you. Then you can tell us that doing so isn't really a problem - even if the person being pummeled is completely innocent. After all, as you state in your article, "Would you rather take some lumps in a dungeon for a month or take a dirt nap forever?"