Play, Pause, And Explain

The hideous, slow distortion of our basic moral values by the Bush administration cannot be allowed to prevail:

When Mike McConnell says “You can do waterboarding lots of different ways…I assume you can get to the point that a person is actually drowning” he is asking us to look at the trees and not the forest. We know waterboarding is torture and we desperately want to believe that our leaders haven’t directed it. We approach our leaders predisposed to believe anything that will put the conscience at ease – we want to believe we’re the good guys. Therefore we are entirely willing to let our leaders play, pause and explain. (Play) waterboarding is really bad (pause) but it can be done lots of different ways and probably some of them aren’t torture and you can bet your bottom dollar that THOSE are the varieties of it we use. He invites us to mentally pause the tape over and over again while he explains the non-torturous nature of each drop.

A war crime is a war crime is a war crime. Prosecute them.