Extremely Lame

And we Americans wonder why the world hates us. Or at least our government. The director of the CIA, General Michael Hayden, went on Meet the Press yesterday, and came damned close to admitting that we torture people. I cannot believe the brass balls on this character. He’s making the argument that the CIA should not be held to the Army Field Manual when it comes to interrogating prisoners. The argument is that the Army Field Manual tells the reader what an interrogator can do, whereas Hayden believes that if an act isn’t specifically barred, then it’s fair game to use. Or at least that seems what he is getting at.

And so the issue for us is, is, is not torture or licensing torture or licensing waterboarding. And to the best of my ability I’ve made it very clear that we don’t do that. But to limit us to what America’s Army thinks they can train young soldiers to do under minimal supervision against lawful combatants in a transient battlefield situation, when our circumstances are completely different, means we’re undercutting our ability to defend the nation.

Okay, so we don’t torture people in the CIA, but we shouldn’t take torture off the table for us. I can agree to a point that there’s a chasm of difference between someone who has been trained to be a professional interrogator and some poor kid who doesn’t really know what he’s doing in Iraq. That said, I can’t think of a good reason to tell the American public that the Army’s no torture memo doesn’t apply to them in so many words.

Later on, we get Gen. Hayden getting into a semantic argument about what the definition of is is. Check out this gem.

Well, first of all, we’re not talking about torture, all right?  I mean, torture is a legal term.  Now, there are some things that are illegal that are not, that are not torture.  And so we cloud the debate when, when we throw the word torture out there, I think, in a far too casual way.

There are some things that aren’t torture, but aren’t legal anyways. I’m assuming he’s talking about waterboarding here. Seriously, do we really want other people getting into these same kinds of semantic arguments about what is and is not torture when it’s our citizens on the receiving end?

I’m not even getting into the argument that torture doesn’t provide us with accurate actionable intelligence. Torture is just something a civilized country doesn’t do.