Iranian Torture

Via Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, we learn of this tweet:

Tehrani source close to those detained says some have been beaten heavily and waterboarded with hot water

To which CB at the Dish writes:

Andrew recently stated, "The Tehran regime does not have a record of waterboarding." Could this then be a new development? If so, Ahmadinejad will clearly want to invoke the "Americans did it first!" argument. Sadly, he would be right - regardless of the fact that Iran's torture record is far more brutal and far less justifiable than Cheney's. But he and Yoo have blurred the bright line forever.

OF COURSE (and I write this to pre-empt any sort of "he's making a moral equivalence" argument) Iran's torture is far more brutal than Bush/Cheney's. Same thing with Saddam for that matter - Saddam's torturers did far more damage than Bush/Cheney's torturers. Of course.

As Sullivan wrote:

The Iranian mullahs are clearly worse in their degree of torture than America's neocons, and they use it against citizens for mere political expression, not to procure or compell evidence for charges of terrorism. But the distinction between their torture and the West's is now a matter of parsing. The line has been blurred.

And the impact of America's endorsement of these torture techniques can only make the experience of the tortured that much harder to endure. Before Bush-Cheney, the tortured around the world knew that there was a place that didn't do this, that there was a human civilization bigger and better than this. No longer. And this is Cheney's signal contribution to the twenty-first century: he has made the world much, much safer for torture - by people with fewer scruples than David Addington. And those fighting for freedom around the world will be the foremost victims of the neocons' deployment of the "dark side".

And I wish I'd written this about the Iranian waterboarding:

In my younger years, I would simply expect this news to be greeted with universal outrage, knowing that the techniques being described had long been deemed to be well across the Bridge Too Far. Now that I've lived through the Bush administration, however, I am forced to contemplate the possibility that Iran is merely taking legitimate steps to obtain critical information in their nations' vital national security interests. One mustn't preclude the possibility that many of those being waterboarded are privy to information about "time bombs" that may, at this moment, be "ticking."

The whole matter could be investigated, I suppose, but I'm also forced to consider that once Iran is through this rough patch, it would be better if everyone involved just looked forward, not backward.

Another thing we have to be proud of the day before Independence Day.