ERIC SCHEIE: “I’m still trying to figure out exactly who is supposed to be persuaded, and of what.”

UPDATE: This post explores a related phenomenon.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Heh. “A new form of McCarthyism” indeed. The really dumb form . . . .

I promise, however, not to tar all of Media Matters with its employee Oliver Willis’s endorsement of torture and rejection of the judicial process:

So there’s a story that two Al Qaeda members may have died under torture in Afghanistan. Alex says “the use of torture like this simply cannot stand”. I am honestly trying to see this as a bad thing, but its hard. These guys were members of the Al Qaeda network. They weren’t Joe Afghan Civilian who was the suspect of a crime, they were members of a terrorist network whose sole purpose on this planet is to kill as many of us as they can.

I hear the arguments for morality, and protests that because we’re Americans we just can’t do this – and while I think the logic may be sound, we spent too many days watching the powdered remains of people being removed from the WTC, incinerated bodies from the Pentagon, corpses from The Cole and the embassies in Kenya or the nightclub in Bali for me to give two seconds of thought into the fact that the last minutes of life for an Al Qaeda soldier may have been unpleasant.

Some believe that because I’m a liberal that my argument against war in Iraq and that our focus should be on Al Qaeda is just so much partisan bickering. But that’s not true. The world will be a better place when every member of the Al Qaeda network is dead. Not arrested and tried under some B.S. court, but dead.

After all, that was way back in 2003! (Oliver later “clarified” this, but his archives seem to have lost the torture posts, and the link in the Wayback Machine version is taking me to Amazon for some reason; maybe you’ll have better luck. But hey, I’m providing more context and fairness than some people . . . .)