Torture

Deroy Murdock's remarkable National Review Online column saying Americans should be "proud" of waterboarding prisoners was bad enough. In response Ramesh Ponnuru suggested that the logic of Murdock's argument was that the Bush administration should be waterboarding more prisoners. Murdock now tells Ponnuru that: [T]he whole point of my piece is that I AM complaining that we do NOT waterboard enough. Yes, we need to waterboard more. At the moment, waterbaording appears to have been banned by both the CIA and the Pentagon. As I say pretty directly in my piece, Bush should reinstate waterboarding publicly and proudly, and I called him deluded for thinking he would gain anything by going along with the Left and ditching waterboarding. . . .

Chris Orr decries Mickey Kaus's decrying of The Bourne Ultimatum as "anti-American". Chris is right to observe that the film's good guys are also American government officers and that Joan Allen's character says of water-boarding etc that "This isn't us" but ultimately (ha!) I can't quite agree with his conclusion. I thought it a rather searing indictment of the United States, albeit for rather different reasons. As my friends know I'm generally a pretty pro-America kind of chap. Some of my best friends are American, don't you know. Even so, there are limits. What The Bourne Ultimatum did capture was an arrogance that gives the United States a permanent right to do as it pleases anywhere in the world.