the trouble with torture is this. If it is legal ethical and moral for the federal gov. to torture people , then it is legal ethical and moral for all the law enforcement agencies in the US to do the same.

It has not been too long ago that the police in this country regularly beat and tortured confessions out of the people they arrested. Remember rubber hoses? If you were poor or a person of color and the police wanted to hang a crime on you ,you were in deep trouble. What you allow your government to do to people that you consider your enemies ,your government will at some time do to you.

I've made this point for a long time. They say these detainees don't have any rights. It would not take much for them to be convinced that some American citizens shouldn't have rights, either. Their citizenship status, the circumstances of war...none of it really matters. The truth is, these people have an ends-justifies-the-means mentality, and that won't stop with non-citizens. Heck, they support domestic spying, and they tried to strip Jose Padilla of his right of due process.

It is a good point. I've debated pro-torture folks by asking that if it's safe and legal (which they have been claiming describes waterboarding), why shouldn't we have the local cops waterboarding every suspect? Only after being given the proper training, ofcourse. Another side benefit from the military's use of torture.

The 'ticking time bomb' example that they are so happy to give relates more accurately to law enforcement than a military/terrorist situation. There's a body buried and the suspect won't talk? Get out that board and pail. Someone has abducted a child? Bring in anyone that's even looked at the kid in the last 24 hrs and torture away...sooner or later someone will talk.

Oh wait...isn't any confession gathered under duress inadmissable in a court of law? Better get the lawyers working on that one and change it quick...

Here's a great article by Zelikow:

<link>

At the end, he points out that legalizing torture for terrorists is essentially legalizing the torture of all criminal suspects:

"The underlying absurdity of the administration's position can be summarized this way. Once you get to a substantive compliance analysis for "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" you get the position that the substantive standard is the same as it is in analogous U.S. constitutional law. So the OLC must argue, in effect, that the methods and the conditions of confinement in the CIA program could constitutionally be inflicted on American citizens in a county jail. "

todji, thanks for the link and quote. I am also wondering who leaked to Hirsch. Someone in the Bush admin was very uncomfortable with what was going on...

So Graham is saying it's understandable or excusable to break the law in the wake of a tragedy. Makes me wonder what his response was to the looters in New Orleans after Katrina.