From Salon.com (occasional emphasis mine)
...[Victor Davis] Hanson has been joined by a couple of other lonely war hawks in denouncing torture, including Andrew Sullivan and blogger Sebastian Holsclaw, who weighed in earlier this month: "President Bush must be shown that the Republican Party is not willing to stand for the perversion of our moral standards," Holsclaw wrote. "The Republican-controlled Senate and the Republican-controlled House can close the loophole which allows for extraordinary rendition and can loudly reaffirm that torture is not something we do. We are the majority party, and we claim to be a party that cares about the moral health of the nation. We are damning ourselves if we sit back and let it continue."
But Hanson says that the political right's overwhelming silence on torture probably results from many continuing to believe that such means do justify the ends, assuming that interrogation by torture is effective for culling useful information (few, if any intelligence experts believe that it is), and that we're facing a new type of more "insidious" enemy.
National Review Online editor at large Jonah Goldberg is one who subscribes to that view.
"There are a lot of people who support the war who simply understand that these are some of the lesser evils of fighting a war on terrorism," Goldberg said in a phone interview.
That's in spite of the fact, he says, that some detainees who have been tortured turn out to be innocent.
"To be brutally honest, I'm torn about it. I don't mean to be callous about it: I think the U.S. government should do everything it can to see to it that innocent people don't get treated horribly. I don't know anybody on the right who would say, 'I'm in favor of innocent people being tortured.' But that said, I think a lot of people on the right are skeptical of hype: That the allegations are not nearly as horrendous or as widespread a matter of policy as the media portrays."
Goldberg adds that many Bush supporters are more "realist" than their detractors say. "For an undertaking of this scale, this war is probably one of the most humanitarian efforts the U.S. has ever conducted, in terms of limiting civilian casualties and all of these things. What you get is an environment in which the U.S. gets punished for only being good, and not being perfect," he says. "But many people I know don't buy into the notion that wars which need to be won can be fought as antiseptically as people who are against the war claim they should be."
For him, that concept extends to the clandestine activities of the U.S. government. "If, because of a legal regime in the U.S. which guarantees the civil liberties of Americans -- and I'm all in favor of that -- we have to go to other countries in order to successfully interrogate terrorists, then I'm not horrified by that proposition," Goldberg says. And while he concedes that it fundamentally contradicts what the United States stands for, "what undermines what we stand for," he says, "is the publication of all this information."
"We did all sorts of terrible things in World War II, and there was a reason why we had military censors," he says. "I do think there's a reason why the CIA does this stuff in secret, and why I think it should do a lot of things in secret. These things have a lot of propaganda value, both negative and positive, so I think we need to separate out what we think are 'good policies' from what the consequences are if those policies are publicized."
"There are lots of things that are ugly and terrible about war," Goldberg adds. "I think that people on the right are more comfortable allowing for that."
Read the whole story at http://www.salon.com/opinion/right_hook/2005/02/28/torture/index.html
And please tell me, what the *hell* is wrong with these people?
But Hanson says that the political right's overwhelming silence on torture probably results from many continuing to believe that such means do justify the ends, assuming that interrogation by torture is effective for culling useful information (few, if any intelligence experts believe that it is), and that we're facing a new type of more "insidious" enemy.
National Review Online editor at large Jonah Goldberg is one who subscribes to that view.
"There are a lot of people who support the war who simply understand that these are some of the lesser evils of fighting a war on terrorism," Goldberg said in a phone interview.
That's in spite of the fact, he says, that some detainees who have been tortured turn out to be innocent.
"To be brutally honest, I'm torn about it. I don't mean to be callous about it: I think the U.S. government should do everything it can to see to it that innocent people don't get treated horribly. I don't know anybody on the right who would say, 'I'm in favor of innocent people being tortured.' But that said, I think a lot of people on the right are skeptical of hype: That the allegations are not nearly as horrendous or as widespread a matter of policy as the media portrays."
Goldberg adds that many Bush supporters are more "realist" than their detractors say. "For an undertaking of this scale, this war is probably one of the most humanitarian efforts the U.S. has ever conducted, in terms of limiting civilian casualties and all of these things. What you get is an environment in which the U.S. gets punished for only being good, and not being perfect," he says. "But many people I know don't buy into the notion that wars which need to be won can be fought as antiseptically as people who are against the war claim they should be."
For him, that concept extends to the clandestine activities of the U.S. government. "If, because of a legal regime in the U.S. which guarantees the civil liberties of Americans -- and I'm all in favor of that -- we have to go to other countries in order to successfully interrogate terrorists, then I'm not horrified by that proposition," Goldberg says. And while he concedes that it fundamentally contradicts what the United States stands for, "what undermines what we stand for," he says, "is the publication of all this information."
"We did all sorts of terrible things in World War II, and there was a reason why we had military censors," he says. "I do think there's a reason why the CIA does this stuff in secret, and why I think it should do a lot of things in secret. These things have a lot of propaganda value, both negative and positive, so I think we need to separate out what we think are 'good policies' from what the consequences are if those policies are publicized."
"There are lots of things that are ugly and terrible about war," Goldberg adds. "I think that people on the right are more comfortable allowing for that."
Read the whole story at http://www.salon.com/opinion/right_hook/2005/02/28/torture/index.html
And please tell me, what the *hell* is wrong with these people?