Via Christina Bellantoni, we have Liz Cheney, yesterday at CPAC, aflutter with concern that the lack of torture is diminishing the potency of the Cheney family seed:
I worry though when we capture these leaders that we no longer have the option of using any of the enhanced interrogation techniques because the president took those off the table. When you've got people in captivity we'd like our CIA officials in particular to have the capacity to do more than just ask the terrorists to please tell us what they want.
Liz Cheney proposes, Spencer Ackerman disposes. But here's a sentence that really jumped out at me:
It would be interesting to hear her tell Gen. David Petraeus why the Central Command leader is wrong about the relationship between torture and success in counterinsurgency, to say nothing of Petraeus' views on the relationship between torture and the moral fabric of America.
It strikes me as an essential truth that America's Top Torture Thrillists are virtually, to a man, the sort of people who would tout Petraeus as the greatest military leader since King Leonidas. How do they reconcile their fandom for Petraeus with Petraeus' crystal clear opinion on torture being a strategic detriment:
The top U.S. commander in Iraq admonished his troops regarding the results of an Army survey that found that many U.S military personnel there are willing to tolerate some torture of suspects and unwilling to report abuse by comrades.
"This fight depends on securing the population, which must understand that we -- not our enemies -- occupy the moral high ground," Army Gen. David H. Petraeus wrote in an open letter dated May 10 and posted on a military Web site.
He rejected the argument that torture is sometimes needed to quickly obtain crucial information. "Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary," he stated.
What ever became of "listening to the generals on the ground?"
RELATED:
Liz Cheney Loves Torture, Doesn't Understand Interrogation [Washington Independent]
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