Moral equivalence

This kind of treatment is obviously needed to protect our national security:

“They tortured me, some beatings, sleep deprivation, insults, psychological torture, standing me for several hours in front of a wall, keeping me in solitary confinement for one year,” Mr. Afshari said in an interview from his home in Washington. “They eventually broke my resistance.”

Three years later, Mr. Memarian, the journalist and blogger, was arrested in another security sweep. He said that his interrogator at first sought to humiliate him by forcing him to discuss details of his sex life, and that when he hesitated, the interrogator would grab his hair and smash his head against the wall.

The pressure was agonizing, he said, as he was forced to live in a small cell for 35 days with a light burning all the time and only three trips to the bathroom allowed every 24 hours. He was forced to shower in front of a camera, he said. At one point the interrogators threatened to break his fingers.

Walling. Sleep deprivation. Stress positions. The threat and implication that even worse forms of pain will result if the suspect doesn’t talk: These are all means of keeping our country safe from attack.

…

Oh, wait. Sorry. These are the techniques Iranians are using to extract false confessions from democratic reformers. Well, then: Torture is bad!