wrong mind

i really don't understand why any administration in its right mind would fight so hard to stop congress from making torture totally illegal.

not only is it a treaty violation—and i don't mean the geneva conventions but a separate torture treaty that has nothing to do with whether victims are prisoners of war—but it damages our prestige among nations, gives our enemies a credible pretext for retaliatory violence, brutalizes not only the victim but the torturer, and is just plain wrong.

add the fact that information obtained by torture is unreliable—because the innocent know nothing and the guilty will almost always be prepared to lie—while legal interrogation methods more often get useful results, and it becomes incomprehensible that any competent official would defend it.

maybe the answer's in the question: they're not in their right minds.

bush's fall from grace has generated a hunker-in-the-bunker mentality so all-consuming that his loyalists have lost perspective and try to defend every bit of besieged turf, including the alleged power of the president to do anything he wants in wartime, even declare torture ok when "necessary."

the israelis tried something like that for a while. their courts ruled torture permissible in extreme situations to stop terrorism. after several years they revisited the issue and found suspects getting tortured almost as a rule rather than an exception, so they banned it completely.

they learned from their mistake. anybody can learn from their own mistakes, but you save time and trouble if you learn from somebody else's errors.

unfortunately, the bush folk seem to prefer to be guided by a very few exceptional examples when torture got useful results. not only don't they learn from other countries' mistakes, available evidence indicates they're unable to admit their own blunders.

as things keep going wrong and their world view unravels around them, it looks more and more as if their group head is having a group panic attack.

panic produces both flight and fight, so, as they self-destruct, get ready to duck.