Mandatory Reading OR ELSE!

Conservative blogger extraordinaire Andrew Sullivan has a must read reply to Charles Krauthammer's Weekly Standard piece condoning torture within strict constraints. Torture is the stuff that rightly depletes the U.S. standing in the world, because as Sullivan so accurately writes:

Torture is the polar opposite of freedom. It is the banishment of all freedom from a human body and soul, insofar as that is possible. As human beings, we all inhabit bodies and have minds, souls, and reflexes that are designed in part to protect those bodies: to resist or flinch from pain, to protect the psyche from disintegration, and to maintain a sense of selfhood that is the basis for the concept of personal liberty. What torture does is use these involuntary, self-protective, self-defining resources of human beings against the integrity of the human being himself. It takes what is most involuntary in a person and uses it to break that person's will. It takes what is animal in us and deploys it against what makes us human.

With all his grand enuciations of this most hollowed virtue, you'd think President Bush would get why torture violates everything the U.S. is supposed to stand for in a world characterized by fanatical, genocidal terrorists and dictators.