Glen Greenwald, via Will Wilkinson:
(1) The fact that we are not really bothered any more by taking helpless detainees in our custody and (a) threatening to blow their brains out, torture them with drills, rape their mothers, and murder their children; (b) choking them until they pass out; (c) pouring water down their throats to drown them; (d) hanging them by their arms until their shoulders are dislocated; (e) blowing smoke in their face until they vomit; (f) putting them in diapers, dousing them with cold water, and leaving them on a concrete floor to induce hypothermia; and (g) beating them with the butt of a rifle — all things that we have always condemend as “torture” and which our laws explicitly criminalize as felonies (”torture means. . . the threat of imminent death; or the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering . . .”) — reveals better than all the words in the world could how degraded, barbaric and depraved a society becomes when it lifts the taboo on torturing captives.
Will’s added commentary is worth reading too.
Sadly, many detainees (none of them convicted or known to be guilty of any crime) have already been raped, tortured, and murdered while in the hands of our people.
They have every reason to believe that these threats will be carried out.
Sam Harris disagrees. He thinks torture is necessary sometimes.
And so is pre emptive nuclear war.
And so is killing people with BELIEFS that atheists don’t like.
Etc.
Practitioners of atheistically based philosophies have killed millions.
Who ya kiddin, sport?
Ah, I see you are censoring.
Well, feel free to email me and if I am wrong.
Or run and hide if you think I’m right.
So long.
Nope, not censoring. First time commenters get their comments held in the moderation queue. Once one comment is approved, future comments go straight into the thread. It’s a way of keeping out spam, and comments that don’t mean a (obviously very) minimal standard of worthwhileness.