WAKEY WAKEY

National Review’s Mark Levin wakes up, stretches, rubs his eyes and asks:

And where is all the evidence that U.S. armed forces and intelligence serves are engaged in torture? Is it widespread? Where is this occurring? McCain hasn’t made the case. We get mostly the same kind of platitudes he was famous for during the campaign-finance reform debate, e.g., the system is “corrupt,” money equals corruption, and so forth. Shouldn’t we stop beating up ourselves over this until such evidence is presented? We seem to be making law here based on hypothetical arguments, or worse — left-wing and enemy propaganda.

I refer Levin to the Schmidt Report, the Taguba Report, the Jones-Fay Report, the Schlesinger Report, the mounds of evidence collected by the International Red Cross, the hundreds of carefully checked newspaper reports documenting torture, abuse, murder, rape, and beatings in every single theater of this war by every branch of the armed services against defenseless military detainees. I refer him to the testimony of West Point graduate Ian Fishback and countless others. I refer him to the many memos constructed by the Bush administration defining and redefining “torture” to the point of meaninglessness. May I offer him a cup of coffee and a warm welcome to reality as well?

(By the way, the Lowry notion that the McCain Amendment offers no guidelines as to what is permitted is untrue. The McCain Amendment specifically endorses the Army Field Manual, which specifies 17 specific interrogation techniques, and has been the gold standard for decades, until the Bush administration endorsed torture. One question for Lowry: does he define “waterboarding” as torture? It’s funny but I have yet to get a single Bush apologist on record saying so. I’d think waterboarding is indisputably torture. Condi Rice won’t say if it is. Rumsfeld won’t say if it is. Bush won’t say if it is. Ever wonder why? Memo to Lowry: because we’ve done it.)