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Thursday, December 4, 2008 12:00 AM

Why do Feinstein and Wyden sound much different on the torture issue now?

The two Senators spent the year emphatically insisting that the CIA's interrogators comply with the Army Field Manual. With Democrats in control, they're not so emphatic any longer
Glenn Greenwald

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  • Thursday, December 4, 2008 12:41 PM

    Timothy

    You're assuming that a) said person actually possesses critical information; b) that information can be reliably extracted via torture; c) the information "extracted" will happily prevent some earth-shaking event.

    Those are precisely my assumptions. If any of them is absent, then there is no excuse or justification for torture and there is nothing to debate. But that begs the question: What to do when all those factors ARE present?

    —wbgonne Read wbgonne's other letters

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