"Has anyone in the Bush family ever earned something on their own without family connections?"

George Senior got Phi Beta Kappa at Yale and the Distinguished Flying Cross in World War II. Yeah, I know, his family put him in a position where those things could happen. Fact is, he succeeded.

Before you dump on me, please reflect on the wisdom of not underestimating your opponent. Just because someone got to the top through family connections doesn't mean he is incompetent. We need to see them clearly, as they really are, not as we would like to think they are. If you kid yourself they are all fools and incompetents, they will be able to sucker punch you.

BTW, lemecdutex, just because I challenged you on your throwaway line doesn't mean I didn't like your post. I did. Nice to see something thoughtful.

"So, are you really saying that you are willing to risk the deaths of ... thousands, rather than inflict procedures that do not do permanent injury or inflict physical harm? I'm not talking about pulling fingernails with pliers or putting electrodes to testicles. I'm talking about sleep deprivation, stress positions, humiliation and, yes, waterboarding, which is psychologically terrifying but physically harmless. You REALLY wouldn't do that (to a mass murderer, not an innocent, by the way) if it meant possibly saving thousands of men, women and children?"

O yes I would. Furthermore, it's an easy decision, because the ethical point matches up pretty well with the long-term interest of the United States. If the United States allows its agents to torture people, that is going to have repercussions, very bad repercussions. Do you really think it harmless if the rest of the world begins classing us with Nazis, the KGB, Torquemada and Argentinian generals?

I will add that in the real world, you won't KNOW the suspect is a mass murderer, not an innocent; and you won't KNOW he has critical information. You'll have to work on suspicion & surmise, and if you torture people on that basis, that is the road to Hell.

I will also add that even if torture "works," that's not the end of the story. Torture worked fine on the tactical level for the French in Algeria. But France no longer owns Algeria. Not a coincidence.

BTW, I live in downtown Washington DC, a prime terrorist target if ever there was one. And some years ago I was within range of a Muslim terrorist who wasn't aiming at me but might have hit me nonetheless. So I understand the terrorist risk better than some.

"Cheney... is a habitual and pathological user of propaganda, so he does know that one of the tools of a propagandist is to toy with the audience with little bits of "balance" so as to throw them off guard. That's why he might have tossed in that paragraph that you've cited as your evidence that he wasn't the behind the scenes author of the article."

*** Fair point. I'm inclined to think that to provide "balance", Cheney would have put in the quote from Amnesty International that The Post used, but not the KSM quote, because it would have been too damaging. But I admit you could well be right.

"If you are in a situation where you are convinced that you have an individual who has information that you could use to head off a possible terrorist attack, and you strongly suspect the individual is holding back on that information despite all your best efforts at non-torture information extraction, do you mean to tell me you wouldn't resort to waterboarding or sleep deprivation or threats against the individual's family to try and get it? Are you serious?"

Okay, I'll play your game. If it's okay to torture the suspect in such circumstances, is it okay to torture his wife and kids and mother? Is it okay to kill them one by one in front of them until he cracks? How about nuking Mecca? Is there any limit beyond which you would not go even to save thousands of American lives? That's a serious question.

Me, I draw the line approximately where our anti-torture statute and the 8th Amendment do. Torture is wrong, period.

And by the way, thelastnamechosen has IMHO the best response to your post. Some things are more important than a long life. If to keep our self-respect and our Constitutional rights, we have to risk some Americans dying, so be it.

Obamabot, I didn't say or mean what you think I did. Glenn said "I defy anyone to identify a single way the article would be different if The Post had let Dick Cheney write it himself." I was taking up his challenge by showing an example of a quote that was in the article that Cheney definitely wouldn't have put in. Glenn overstated his case against The Washington Post. I say "overstate" because I think his basic thesis is right. What do you think? Do you think Cheney would have used the quote?

For your convenience, here it is again:

The Post quotes Mohammed as saying: "During the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop. I later told interrogators that their methods were stupid and counterproductive. I'm sure that the false information I was forced to invent in order to make the ill-treatment stop wasted a lot of their time,"