"But maybe I have a case of outrage fatigue, because it just doesn't sound dramatically worse than the stuff Yoo blessed in the accursed memos."

Al-Nashiri, the man threatened with the power drill, claimed that his torture led him to falsely confess that Bin Laden had a nuclear bomb.

Ibn al-Libi was tortured - after being kidnapped from the FBI to Egypt - into falsely confessing an wmd's operational link between al Qaeda and Iraq. This became one of the major selling points for the invasion of Iraq. When the FBI had been interrogating him he had told them that there was no such link.

The administration was getting correct intelligence and rejecting it for ideological reasons, using torture to manufacture the sorts of "intelligence" which confirmed what they already believed.

Literally hundreds of thousands of people are dead because the Bush administration decided to torture - and the destruction of the CIA tapes demonstrates an intention to cover up the crime that it was.

And yet we have people like Chuck Todd telling us we'll set a bad example to the world if we prosecute people for war crimes.

So to recap the Beltway wisdom: torturing people to manufacture false "intelligence" to mislead the country into a war which ended hundreds of thousands of lives and attempting to hide the evidence of the process is fine, only partisan ideologues care about it. Holding persons whose actions led to death and destruction on a scale that the human mind can hardly conceive of sets a bad example and will get in the way of "journalists" like Chuck Todd doing he said/she said color commentary on the health care debate.

...that someone doesn't know what they talk about is if they say that only the stuff you see in the Saw movies is torture. The ICRC is the internationally recognized authory on torture. When they say it's torture, it's torture.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22614

Few things are more repellent than watching the contemporary Right in America invoke the principles of the Founders -- in general -- to justify their warped and lawless authoritarianism. But nothing is more repulsive than watching them pretend that Thomas Paine -- of all people -- has anything to do with them (Glenn Beck actually wrote his most recent book based on the explicit pretense that he is the modern day Paine). Any casual reading of Paine makes clear that, today, he would be so far on what is deemed the "left" side of the spectrum that you'd be unable to find him.

Not only did Beck try to make himself into Paine, but he's also featured on his program the YouTube "right-wing" sensation of the old guy who pretends to be Thomas Paine but expresses quasi-fascist views about how there going to be blood on the streets unless patriots unify against foreigners, multiculturalism, people that are in favor of Social Security/healthcare, secularists/atheists and what not ... whom he calls "traitors."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKFKGrmsBDk&feature=related

Beck had him on the show - and Beck oddly claimed to be a direct biological descendent of Paine - to justify an anti-tax "revolution" to dismantle the welfare state, which Beck routinely characterizes as "liberal fascism" and/or socialism/marxism.

The real Thomas Paine wrote in two of his major works - Rights of Man and Agrarian Justice - that the French revolution could establish its legitimacy by creating a welfare state!

http://www.thomaspaine.org/Archives/agjst.html

Personal property is the effect of society; and it is as impossible for an individual to acquire personal property without the aid of society, as it is for him to make land originally.

Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.

[snip]

It is a revolution in the state of civilization that will give perfection to Revolution of France. Already the conviction that government by representation is the true system of government is spreading itself fast in the world. The reasonableness of it can be seen by all. The justness of it makes itself felt even by its opposers. But when a system of civilization, (growing out of that system of government) shall be so organized that not a man or woman born in the Republic but shall inherit some means of beginning the world, and see before them the certainty of escaping the miseries that under other governments accompany old age, the Revolution of France will have an advocate and an ally in the heart of all nations.

They destroy Paine's memory in order to claim it.