The XX Factor: What women really think.

The Torture Defenders

But Emily, you are so clearly reading the wrong newspapers again! Because on the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal today we learn that what was done to Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was not only not torture—since it was being “continuously monitored”—but it also saved America from a a "second wave" of al-Qaida attacks, to be carried out by an "east Asian" affiliate, which would have involved the crashing of another airplane into a building in Los Angeles.” So quite obviously that 179th water-boarding of KSM really was as necessary as the very first.

To me the most interesting development in the torture debate this weekend is that the torture defenders deploy about three different playground techniques in an attempt to minimize the obscenity of what we have learned: Either they go the frat-boy route; the “hahahaha bugs-in-a-box-they-so-did-that-to-me-at-prep-school” defense. Or they trot out the sanctimonious claim that anyone who opposes torture must just hate America. Or, as we learn today in the Wall Street Journal, that it can’t have been torture if lawyers authorized it and doctors were monitoring it. Each argument is more circular than the next. But then I suppose if you're defending the legal principle that "it isn't torture unless we say it is," circular arguments are all you need.