Thoughts On Torture: The Good, The Bad, and The Republican

It's Not A Game

But... Try to match up these people from the Torture Hall of Fame with the various pictures of torture or the various symbols. It's Fun! It's totally subjective!

HANNITY: “I am having a hard time understanding, though, why dunking somebody’s head in water….just to scare the living daylights out of them… why would you oppose that?”

LIZ CHENEY: “[T]he tactics are not torture, we did not torture. The memos lay out the extent of exactly how far we could go before it would become torture because it was very important that we not cross that line into torture.”

HUCKABEE: “It was like a carnival ride. … For example, it wasn’t that we were actually going to drown someone, but it was a simulation of it. And for that, there was in fact some information that came forth.”

SEN. LIEBERMAN: “Most people think it’s definitely torture. The truth is, it has mostly a psychological impact on people. … [W]e ought to be able to use something like waterboarding.”

CHENEY: Clearly what they are doing is releasing images that show American military men and women in a very negative light. And I have heard from families of service members, from families of 9/11 victims, this question about, you know, when did it become so fashionable for us to side, really,with the terrorists?

ROVE: Taking, for example, the memoranda about the enhanced interrogation techniques and making them public has been a value to our enemy. It has served, frankly, I think, as a recruiting tool. They can now take these memoranda and go to prospective, you know, recruits and say, This is the worst that the enemy, the United States, would ever do to you, and they’ve even forsworn these things. We can help you, prepare you to deal with these things, but even the enemy is so weak they’re not going to use these techniques on you. And it’s given them a tool to make it more attractive to recruit people, and you know, this kind of thing is harmful to us over the long haul.

Lt. Col. Ton Hicks U.S. National Guard:

"...while it would be terrible to lose one of them or have one of them seriously physically injured, it would be worse to have them come home physically well and mentally broken because they had somehow lost their humanity. Torture destroys our humanity, and any equivocation (feel free to exercise the Kantian absolutist vs utilitarian argument to your heart’s content) on the matter is just bullshit."