I hesitate to post about this, since Cohen begins with “Blogger alert” and agrees that torture is a “moral abomination”, but nevertheless it’s a fascinating glimpse into contemporary Beltway media thinking:
But where I reserve a soupçon of doubt is over the question of whether “enhanced interrogation techniques” actually work. That they do not is a matter of absolute conviction among those on the political left, who seem to think that the CIA tortured suspected terrorists just for the hell of it.
Cheney, though, is adamant that the very measures that are now deemed illegal did work and that, furthermore, doing away with them has made the country less safe. Cheney said this most recently on Sunday, on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “Those policies were responsible for saving lives,” he told Bob Schieffer. In effect, Cheney poses a hard, hard question: Is it more immoral to torture than it is to fail to prevent the deaths of thousands?
It’s a perfect example of the Slate/TNR/WaPo tendency towards “what if genocide is good for housing prices” contrarianism. You know the drill: (a) we live in a dangerous world filled with “messy” choices and (b) it’s important to challenge complacent “consensus” by thinking “outside the box.” It’s why Bill Saletan has to “soak his head” in white supremacist propaganda and compare those who reject racial supremacism to those who reject evolution. It’s why Pinochet should be lauded as a hero, not condemned as a mass murderer. It’s why the public needs to hear Amity Shlaes’s distorted New Deal revisionism over and over again.