When will we get serious?

This piece by Andrew McCarthy is more more interesting for the comments than his arguments. He's correct that it would be idiotic to abandon the CIA interrogations of these detainees, but the commenters display that reflexive refusal to engage the real point that we've all come to know. They immediately assume that Bush's proposal is to use torture. No matter how often he repeats that he's not describing torture, they refuse to even consider otherwise.

Another commenter sounds like a classic conservative:

[E]everyone has been able to agree on what the Geneva conventions mean for the past 57 years, but now a newspeaking administration wants to define torture out of existence.

Actually this has never been an issue. Ask John McCain how much the Geneva Conventions did him in Hanoi, until the North Vietnamese decided it might help them in P.R. terms. The plain fact is that people like the ones we fight couldn't care less about the Geneva Accords. If they were civilized, we wouldn't be at war with them.

The opponents seem to think that we're required by international law to reward people who want to destroy civilization and modernity with kid glove hospitality. That's why we can't afford to let them get back into positions of power. I believe this is beginning to sink in as the election nears.

McCain, Graham, Warner and Collins are out of touch with the real problems we face, as is most of the Press. To paraphrase Justice Jackson, the Geneva Conventions are not a suicide pact. Al Qaeda has used weapons of mass destruction already--what else can you call a jet liner being flown into a skyscraper? They have been planning attacks like 9/11 for the past 20 years and we are still treating this like a law enforcement problem. Our courts and our media have eaten away at common sense for far too long. We are have become a nation of lotus eaters.