When John Ashcroft appeared before Congress to deny that the Justice Department engaged in torture, he argued that, not only was torture morally repugnant, it wasn’t even effective. Torture victims will, after all, confess to anything just to make the pain stop.
Vice President Cheney and various other GOP politicians and pundits seem unconvinced. For this reason, I’d like to offer an open challenge to them:
Using only a steel chair bolted to the floor, fifty feet of nylon rope, and a pair of wire cutters, I will guarantee that I can get any GOP doubter to confess to personally ordering the execution of Jesus Christ in less than an hour, and still leave them with most of their fingers and teeth, and maybe — no promises, mind you — a complete set of genitalia.
Frankly, I suspect it will take much less than that.
So do I have any takers? Cheney? Wolfowitz? Limbaugh? Novak?