US Begins Torture

So Ashcroft and Bush now want Congress to allow US Feds to use evidence gained through torture… as long as the torture is sub-contracted out to foreign intelligence operations.

Wonderful. Bin Laden has already succeeded in changing the US from being lessthe wishy-washy moral relativistic democratic liberalist State that he so loathes into more on a hands-on eye-for-an-eye kind of place.

“Don’t use torture. Torture is the crack cocaine of anti-terrorism because, for a while, it works. The terrorists will certainly use it. But everyone tries it. The Brits did it in Northern Ireland, the Israelis use it on the Palestinians and the Palestinian Authority uses it on Palestinians too. The French, in their Algerian war against terrorism in the 1950s, turned it into an instrument of policy. But the price is higher than a democracy can pay.”

This is from a great and hearfelt Salon article by a British guy, explaining how “beating” terrorism is a lot more difficult than it seems.