Torture and Exceptionalism

By FRANK BRUNI
NYT

If we truly believe ourselves to be exceptional, a model for all the world and an example for all of history, then why would we practice torture?

That’s what waterboarding is, and that’s why President Obama banned it — rightly. When you pour water onto someone until he gasps for air and feels as if he’s drowning, you’re not merely enhancing your interrogation. You’re putting him through a hell as physical as it is psychological. You’re torturing him, by any sane definition of the term.

And yet waterboarding was back up for discussion and even back in a kind of perverse vogue on Saturday night, at the same Republican presidential debate where Mitt Romney, pivoting to a favorite melody, sang the song of American greatness and singularity — American exceptionalism. That juxtaposition was odd in the extreme.

I came away from the debate, which was devoted to foreign policy, with all sorts of qualms and questions, including why Newt Gingrich has submitted to an electoral process he feels such palpable condescension toward.

(More here.)