Cheney, Torture, And The Gestapo

For all of the fault that I find with many of Andrew Sullivan's positions on government spending, on torture he may "get it" more than any other blogger in the country. Or rather I should say he may "get it" and be able to explain it better than anybody else. This at the end of his post about torture in which he PWNED his colleague, Marc Ambinder, should be repeated all over the liberal and progressive blogosphere because its real, and it resonates.

Nonetheless, the US-run court ruled that Cheney-style EITs, deployed by the Gestapo with the same justification as Cheney, constituted prosecutable torture:

As extenuating circumstances, [accused torturer] Bruns had pleaded various incidents in which he had helped Norwegians, Schubert had pleaded difficulties at home, and Clemens had pointed to several hundred interrogations during which he had treated prisoners humanely.

The Court did not regard any of the above-mentioned circumstances as a sufficient reason for mitigating the punishment and found it necessary to act with the utmost severity. Each of the defendants was responsible for a series of incidents of torture, every one of which could, according to Art. 3 (a), (c) and (d) of the Provisional Decree of 4th May, 1945, be punished by the death sentence.

And they were executed for war crimes.

The question Americans have to ask themselves is why they hold the former president and vice-president to lower moral and ethical standards than the United States once held the Gestapo. That's all. And that's everything, isn't it?

When he puts it in those terms I think its hard for most average people to support the torture that the Bush/Cheney Administration ordered no matter how many episodes of "24" they have watched.