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Thanks for the pointer. Stuart Taylor misrepresents himself, in my opinion. He presents as not wanting to tear the country apart, not wanting to keep good people from working in government, not wanting to cripple the Obama administration. But then he uses ticking bomb as his debate method, then nitpicking decisions of what is and is not torture.
Basically, this man is not interested fundamentally in the politcal consequences and policy debates and all the other smoke screens. He believes in torture plain and simple, and significantly he believes in defending both American and Israeli practices.
He uses the ticking bomb (the lawyer and the whore), repeatedly, and appeals to integrity repeatedly. This is a man who is justifying, and believes in, the practices, not arguing the political damage. If he is indicative of the media consensus, there are extremely serious implications for the future of the democracy, as Scott Horton points out in Harper's.
