Bamage: seems to me an unusually high percentage of (presumably) regular readers are failing to pick up on this

GG...next semester at Georgetown: Karl Rove teaches Civility in a Post-Partisan Age, Bill Kristol lectures on Accountability in Punditry, while David Gregory examines The Role of Intellect in Adversarial Questioning).

I didn't miss it. In fact I read it several times over. I still don't quite know what to make of it. I can't decide whether it's Glenn being sarcastic or whether its another straight report from an America gone totally mad.

Any indication that Alicia Shepard read either Glenn's or Marcy Wheeler's or any of the other essays from the past few days on those cases in which enhanced interrogation techniques resulted in superconvergent transmigration of souls?

So it is against the law to torture - is it enforcable?

Yes.

Do we have a working definition of torture with practical applications?

Yes.

The word torture is vague as it stands alone.

No. See answer to above question.

What if torture was defined as to the motive behind certain psychological or threatened treatments?

This would open the door to torture with good intentions. However and fortunately, it is not defined as to motive.

Then we might define torture as any type of treatment or suggestion designed to ascertain coveted information.

This is a non-sequitur. Again, torture is not defined by its motive or its purpose.

Such a definition would rule out interrogations of any kind and plea bargining.

Regardless of how torture is defined, information voluntarily provided through non-coercive interrogation (or bought or traded for) is and would be permissible. (h/t Ondelette and Frankly, my dear,...)

Are threats considered torture? Can I threaten an individuals family if he doesn't cooperate? Or is that torture as well?

What do you call it when Bin Laden threatens your family unless your country takes (or ceases taking) certain actions?

Is the application of physical pain the only incidence of torture?

Absolutely not. Arguably, the worst torture does not involve the direct inflicting of physical pain.

Give me more enlightenment.

I suspect it would be far more effective if, armed with this information, you did your own homework with regards to any outstanding questions you may have.

To be fair to Alicia Shepard (not that she's necessarily earned such fairness), she intended her proposal that NPR merely describe the particular techniques rather than "characterizing" them in any way as a (very light) criticism of NPR's current practice, not a description of it.

Shepard's posts on this issue are, as others have pointed out, frequently contradictory and incoherent, but I think she's trying to claim:

1. The best solution would be to simply describe techniques in detail any time they come up in a story because that is most "neutral."

2. NPR's practice of using Bush-administration authored euphemisms, while not the best solution is still somehow more "neutral" than using the word "torture," and is thus both defensible and preferable to calling torture "torture."

Within this sea of nonsense, Shepard's "just describe the technique" suggestion appears to be intended to prove that she is merely explaining NPR's policies not defending them. Like so much else in Shepard's "argument," this attempt fails.

Um GG and PDA, the special place in Hell is the 8th circle, for falsifiers.

Where were you during yesterday's thread? It would have been nice to hear one of your group admit Afghanistan is a war, was a war, and that the USA invaded the place. (if you buy all three) If you do, how very nice.

The new phrase offered is my own, and the point is that we went to war with a country, are still at war with it, and torture people we capture there. All this in addition to bombing the occasional wedding party for entertainment value.

Your point?

Consider the following, from AS's blog entry on torture:

But no matter how many distinguished groups -- the International Red Cross, the U.N. High Commissioners -- say waterboarding is torture, there are responsible people who say it is not. Former President Bush, former Vice President Cheney, their staff and their supporters obviously believed that waterboarding terrorism suspects was necessary to protect the nation's security.

One can disagree strongly with those beliefs and their actions. But they are due some respect for their views, which are shared by a portion of the American public.

The position Shepherd takes here is of a person naive to the blatant lies perpetuated by sociopaths and the corrosive effect of these lies in society. Her conundrum is illustrated in the following example, taken from an interview with the publishers of Political Ponerology, a study of pathological human behavior:

Lying is a very successful strategy because very few people think that there are hardcore liars in society who lie as a matter of course.

Think of a divorce or some other case before a judge and jury. Most of us will go into the proceedings with the idea that the truth is somewhere in the middle. The two opposing sides in a case will tell their stories, each embellishing their story a bit, each putting themselves in the best light, and the judge or jury will assume the truth is somewhere in the middle.

But what happens when one of the people is a liar and the other is a person telling the truth? The liar is at an advantage because the judge or jury will still expect that the truth is somewhere in the middle. So someone who is the victim of a liar and manipulator cannot come out ahead. Telling the truth cannot get that person 100% of the justice he or she deserves, while lying will always get the perpetrator something.

Daily life is like that trial. We are always going to give others the benefit of the doubt, if you are a moral person. The liar and manipulator will never do that and will use the good will of the person of conscience against him.

Lying is therefore always a winning strategy. That, in itself, can be an indicator that we are living in a pathological system!

Shepherd lives in a world in which it is impossible to imagine that the President and Vice President of the United States and their supporters could be anything other than upstanding, responsible people. They couldn't possibly be sociopaths; things like that could never happen here. She inhabits a "different reality," and her naivete is frightening.