Joe Scarborough was on Real Time with Bill Maher last weekend and questioned whether torture can really be called torture when we're dealing with really bad people. Playing on the emotions surrounding 9/11, Joe employs a tool used by the Cheney/Rumsfeld camp in confounding the issue. Here's the pertinent excerpt from the transcript.

SCARBOROUGH: You know, talking about torture, it's important, I think, to define what torture is. Like, for instance, is holding Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the guy that planned 9/11, with something called “water-boarding” – holding him underwater, bringing him up—
MAHER: Okay—
ROBINSON: Yes.
SCARBOROUGH: --and – is that torture?
ROBINSON: Yes, yes, yes.
WATERS: Yes, yes.
SCARBOROUGH: Is that torture? That's torture?
MAHER: Okay, but – but why—
SCARBOROUGH: They're all torture?
MAHER: Wait a second. Why are all the—
SCARBOROUGH: You're not going to answer me?
MAHER: First of all, it is torture. Of course it is. And they do a lot worse, because, obviously, they've killed a lot of people. There are people who have died from this.

I don't think a reasonable person can deny that repeatedly drowning someone, causing them to inhale water, causing them to choke, or depriving them of air, would all be considered torture. So how can it be that Joe Scarborough questions whether others would call this torture? The answer for some would simply be that Joe Scarborough is not a reasonable person. But that simple answer is actually quite telling of why some people, normally considered reasonable, can conclude that the type of treatment described by Joe Scarborough would in fact be an acceptable way to treat people held by the U.S. Government.

You can get just about anyone to admit that a person who has committed the most depraved acts, who has murder people in cold blood, in the most vicious ways, deserves to meet the same fate as their victims. This is in fact the gut reaction of most people, and the basis for popular support of capital punishment. Even in countries that do not have capital punishment, this opinion prevails. It is this visceral, emotional reaction to the crime that brings about the mindset that we are not only justified, but that we ought to, descend, just a bit, down that slippery slope.

The emotional clouding of the issue is clear in the way Joe Scarborough phrases the question about the treatment of detainees. He invokes the heinous nature of the enemy in the same sentence as the description of their treatment. By juxtaposing 9/11 with the euphemistic "water-boarding", suddenly this treatment of someone like Khalid Sheikh Muhammad doesn't seem all that bad. Our moral compass gets skewed pretty quickly when we throw around cutesy terms like "water-boarding" and keep the horrors of 9/11 close in our mind.

What this accomplishes is it obfuscates and masks how far down the slippery slope we've actually travelled. The definitions are shifted and re-framed against the backdrop of the crumbling twin towers. It's no longer a question of inadvertently sliding farther down a slope than we ever intended to go. It would be one thing for the administration or the pentagon to come out and admit that they encouraged the use of certain interrogation tactics that got out of hand. But it's something entirely different to purposefully redefine the terminology such that we cannot even say for sure where we've ended up (see newspeak). Terms like "water-boarding", "stress positions" and "deprivation" are not helpful in knowing what in the hell is actually going on, and what the policy of our government actually is. If the newspeak versions of age-old torture tell us anything, they tell us that our government is trying to conceal something from us.

But the photographs from Abu Ghraib tell us all too clearly where we've ended up. The litany of reports on detainee abuse gives a pretty clear indication of what has been, at minimum, tacitly approved treatment of detainees. But the most disturbing part is that the Cheney/Rumsfeld push to allow this kind of treatment of people to continue belies their entire purported goal of transforming the middle-east from its tyranny, oppression and injustice. The "winning hearts and minds" appears to be nothing more than the marketting pitch, while the reality is simply raw, visceral retribution and pay-back. Which, of course, has no end in sight.

When you redefine torture based on the morality (or lack thereof) of the enemy, then by definition you lose the ability to morally distinguish yourself from that enemy. Indeed, the worst thing that could happen to us in Iraq, or Afghanistan, would be for the locals to compare us to what they had before and say: "same shit, different pile".