From the Salmon

Really, the argument should have begun and ended here: Torture is wrong. Period.

But somehow, it didn’t.

Somehow, our government passed a bill that, while it doesn’t come right out and say it, will lead to torture. Not only that, but it will almost certainly lead to the torture of innocent people.

How can we know this? Because it would have been easy to write a bill that provided the necessary safeguards to make such an action both unlikely and highly prosecutable. But that’s not the bill that passed. Not even close.

You simply don’t pass a bill like this unless you know that our government is likely to torture innocent people. You don’t expressly forbid any person from invoking any provision of the Geneva Conventions in any legal action to which the U.S. government or its agents are a party unless you know that our government is likely to violate those conventions both seriously and repeatedly. You don’t make it virtually impossible for a detainee to challenge his status as an enemy combatant unless the potential innocence of that detainee is immaterial to you. And you don’t make these changes retroactive unless you know full well that you’ve already done all of the above.

We are governed by a party that would rather look tough than protect the innocent. We are governed by men and women who would rather be violent than just.

Those are strong statements, but if they weren’t true, our president would be signing a very different bill.