The Bush Torture Now You See It Now You Don't Trick

So, the Pentagon denounces it's previous policy of torture (hooding, sleep depreviation, waterboarding, etc) while the president sends to Congress a bill that would legalize these techniques.

Andrew Sullivan exposes the president's lies here.

The Washington Post, in an editorial today, comes out against torture. Key quote:

But the detention and interrogation regime that Mr. Bush wants Congress to sanction is almost as bad as the one the Supreme Court forced him to set aside in the Hamdan case. Mr. Bush has no regrets about the interrogation tactics used on high-value detainees, which he did not name but which others have said included simulated drowning. He described the techniques as "tough" but "safe and lawful and necessary." But they were not "lawful" -- at least not as the Supreme Court has articulated the law. On the same day that U.S. generals were describing abusive techniques as ineffective and counterproductive, Mr. Bush insisted that the CIA's program of secret detentions and coercive interrogations needs to continue.

So what's this all about? Another story in the Wash Po provides an answer:

All week, the White House has made plain its desire to refocus the attention of voters this fall away from a troubled and unpopular war in Iraq in favor of Bush's vision of a worldwide struggle against Islamic radicalism and terrorism. Yesterday, Bush sought to turn a legal defeat at the Supreme Court into a political opportunity

The story goes on to say:

His success in catching much of Washington by surprise showed that a president who polls show has his political back to the wall still has formidable tools: the ability to make well-timed course corrections on policy, dominate the news and shape the capital's agenda in the weeks before Election Day.

The president is playing election year politics with America's moral values. That, coupled with his administration's general incompetence, is what is truly giving our enemies victory over us. If we abandon the virtues of civilized, Western society in the quest for safety, we've ceased to be what made us worth the fight in the first place. And our enemies will have won.