Denial

Jonah Goldberg wants to make it clear that Dennis Franz's interrogation techniques are not beyond the pale:

Moreover, I have no problem with playing a little smacky-face with prisoners. Think about it. The standard being put forward by [Andrew] Sullivan and others on all this would rule the tactics of Detective Andy Sipowicz on NYPD Blue unacceptable. For years, Sipowicz has been smacking suspects around in order to force them to confess. He threatens to "beat their balls off" every other show.

Is this more or less vile than Rush Limbaugh claiming the Abu Ghraib photos were evidence of nothing other than fraternity-style hijinks? To review, here's what actually occurred:

Many innocent men and boys were raped, brutally beaten, crucified for hours (a more accurate term than put in "stress positions"), left in their own excrement, sodomized, electrocuted, had chemicals from fluorescent lights poured on them, forced to lie down on burning metal till they were unrecognizable from burns - all this in Iraq alone, at several prisons as well as Abu Ghraib...

This brutal treatment occurred, according to various government reports, only at internment facilities which were also designed to get intelligence. Up to 80 percent of the inmates at Abu Ghraib - which was used to get better intelligence - were utterly innocent. The torture was done by hundreds of different U.S. military officers and soldiers from almost every branch of the military. There is no assurance that it has stopped. And there's plenty of evidence that many senior officials knew exactly what was going on.

Where does this cognitive dissonance come from? Those of us who are, shall we say, ashamed about the pervasive use of torture by American interrogators and jailers, are not engaged in a debate with the excuse-makers and apologists. One side (my side) is simply talking past the other. To us, the treatment of prisoners involved things like rape and murder, it occurred repeatedly at multiple prisons, it was justified by internal executive branch memoranda and orders, and as far as anyone knows, it might still be going on. The other side contends that what happened was one or two isolated cases of "a little smacky-face" that had no relation whatsoever to official policy---but if torture [you mean "coercive interrogation"--ed.] were to occur, only a damned Commie would choose to let Americans die rather than allow interrogators to protect the homeland. And if you think about it, what do the torture memos remind you of besides Dan Rather's reporting on phony National Guard memos?

This isn't a dispute about what's right. At least not initially. Despite the mental gymnastics and fraudulent, rigged hypotheticals of which we will never hear any end, I think the president's defenders understand that torture is something deeply wrong. (Or not: Jonah Goldberg is "sympathetic to torture under very specific circumstances.")

The dispute is first and foremost about discrete facts about the world. Were prisoners sodomized or weren't they? Were some killed? Were as many as 80% of them innocent? Were still more guilty of nothing but petty misdemeanors? Did high ranking officials know about the abuses or not? These questions have only two possible answers, and they are not ideological answers. To say that all the evidence points in the direction of "yes" to every question is not a form of "Bush-bashing." Rather, it is an affirmation that external reality is something that multiple rational subjects with adequate information should be able to agree upon. A proposition is a fact if it gives an accurate description of the world. It does not become an un-fact if its truth reflects poorly on George Bush, or if liberals regard it as a fact, or if the "MSM" report it. [Yes that's grammatically correct. "Media" is a plural--ed.]