Terrorists and 'torture'

Heather Mac Donald puts the Gonzales hearings into context with a long piece about U.S. post-9/11 interrogation techniques.

The bottom line is what should have been expected: U.S. military policy never countenanced what any of us would qualify as "torture." On the other hand, Islamofascist terrorists do not respect or respond to polite requests for information.

I'm reminded of the classic movie The Gods Must Be Crazy, in which, in an attempt to gain information from murderous revolutionaries, government agents take a blindfolded captive up into a helicopter. It rises a few feet off the ground and hangs there for a little while, as officers interrogate the captive. When he refuses to talk, they push him out of the helicopter. He falls only a few feet and lands uninjured, but the push brings him face to face with his mortality, and he tells everything. Cruel and inhumane person that I am, I thought it was funny. The Red Cross would beg to differ, and apparently such techniques are no longer permitted to U.S. military in use with people who would fly airliners into office buildings.

Sec. Rumsfeld even has to give personal approval for the terrifying chocolate torture.

I'm glad somebody's civilized on this mad planet.