Now here’s an interesting analogy:
With the whole stem-cell debate, the President’s rationale (I assume) is that “While you may not care about these little old stem cells, once you start making them and doing experiments you are on the whole slippery slope to killing people for medical research”. A position which I agree with, on balance.
Compare this, sadly, to his position on torture, where he did not seem to realise that while it may seem OK to slightly torture some cunning terrorist mastermind, you are then on the same slippery slope to a bunch of soldiers messing with random foreigners just for kicks.
Likewise, as I’m sure we’ll hear over the next few years, the Patriot Act is probably being used for all kinds of non-national-security related criminal investigations.
Slippery slope arguments are dubious, to my mind, but I see the point here. The concrete issue we have to figure out is how the special rules for Guantanamo got transferred to Abu Ghraib. The obvious theory: once the insurgency got even more deadly, the Pentagon got frustrated with their lack of actionable intelligence. Some of the Gitmo techniques had apparently succeeded in getting some useful info, so a decision was made to experiment with them more widely in Iraq – against people who might well not have been in al Qaeda or merely in the wrong place at the wrong time. You can understand the motive, but the risks were under-estimated, and the abuses predictable. Well, we’ll find out soon enough.
DANISH MARRIAGE: It’s the welfare state, stupid.
The Dish 