"the utter moral bankruptcy, the complete dehumanizing vacuousness...."

[kentuck]

http://www.firedoglake.com/2006/04/24/the-dividing-line-of-torture/

<snip>
I don’t know how to write about torture being committed by the US government. It’s an incredibly difficult subject to dissect, in large part because it gets to the heart of why most liberal bloggers do what they do. I don’t know many in the liberal blogosphere whose advertising revenues generated in the free market (as opposed to the wingnut welfare system) even pay for the maintenance of their sites, and those very few whose sites cover their costs could inarguably be making much more money doing something else. But there is something so deeply wrong and at such dissonance between the country we grew up to believe in and what this government is now engaged in that its unspoken presence informs every post, every word, even the decision to get up every morning and turn on the computer. To sit back and do nothing while this happens is unthinkable for anyone who genuinely believes in this country and the principles upon which it was founded.

And there is nothing that reveals the utter moral bankruptcy, the complete dehumanizing vacuousness of the right more than when it steps forward to defend torture and those who petulantly assert their right to engage in it as somehow "patriotic," and call for the elimination of all those who oppose it.

As Glenn Greenwald says:

There certainly appears to be no limits on what Bush followers will endorse in the name of fighting The Enemies, domestic ones included, sometimes most prominently. And what is so significant about this is that the institutions which previously existed as a safeguard against arbitrary punishment and abuse of power — things like due process guarantees, Congressional oversight, an adversarial media, whistleblowers — have all been steadily eroded. The administration has seized the power to arrest people without charges, hold them in secret prisons, use torture to interrogate them, etc. That is all out in the open and prompts defenses of these practices from its followers. That makes the attempt to equate political opposition with criminality and even treason — one of the most common tactics of the administration and its followers — all the more dangerous.

.....more

[ladjf]

1. Has one act of terrorism been prevented by torture ?

If so, what was it?