I was listening to KCRW’s To The Point broadcast about Guantanamo Bay in which a senior naval appointee’s views on how torturing people is antithetical to American values, and the fellow arguning the opposite position immediately began throwing up straw men and splitting legal hairs.<\/p>\n
You know who does that?\u00c2\u00a0 Guilty people.<\/p>\n
Torturing people does<\/em> go against American values.\u00c2\u00a0 More than that, if you want to talk about those values being better than the rest of the world’s values – and I’d really like to – you have to hoild yourself to that higher standard. \u00c2\u00a0 And that means sometimes you do things not only the hard way, but the hardest way.<\/p>\n The basic truth is this: torturing people is always wrong.\u00c2\u00a0 There may be times that it’s the lesser of two evils, but it’s always wrong.\u00c2\u00a0 Any discussion of torture needs to start there.\u00c2\u00a0 After that we can weasel-word around about “lawful combatants” and exactly what penalties are appropriate.\u00c2\u00a0 The point is that if you’ve tortured someone or, worse yet, made someone to do it for you, you’ve done something that’s wrong – something that’s against the self-evident truth that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.\u00c2\u00a0 And you really need to admit that.<\/p>\n Then come issues of legality and punishment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was listening to KCRW’s To The Point broadcast about Guantanamo Bay in which a senior naval appointee’s views on how torturing people is antithetical to American values, and the fellow arguning the opposite position immediately began throwing up straw men and splitting legal hairs. You know who does that?\u00c2\u00a0 Guilty people. Torturing people does […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}