"Terrorists" can't be "tortured"

by shamanic

Reading this rambling answer by Rudy Giuliani, I think it's time we acknowledge the GOP attitude about torture: there is no such thing as "torturing" a "terrorist". The designation "terrorist" makes it impossible to categorize any interrogation technique as "torture", which we can all be thankful for because, as Giuliani says, no president wants to torture.

This has to be the key, because if a guy who wants to be president doesn't think that waterboarding, a really old-school style of torture recognized as such for centuries, is necessarily torture, then the only answer can possibly be that there's something inherent in the victims of such torture that makes it not torture in their case.

If you waterboard a crash test dummy, that's not torture because the dummy is incapable of suffering. Apparently, if you waterboard someone who Rudy says is a "terrorist", it also isn't torture because Rudy knows which human beings are beneath the contempt of an always-outraged constituency.

I will never vote for that man.