Why is torture seductive?

“What is it about torture that is so seductive to our mainstream media?” Rory O’Connor asks on his blog today. He’s taking on the media which, he suggests, has gone to great lengths to defend the use of torture.

That makes US accomplices? I think not – remember, the same media figures told us, falsely, that “Some torture clearly works,” that “we need to keep an open mind” about it, and that “we’ll have to think about transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies, even if that’s hypocritical.” After all, my fellow “accomplices,” as Alter wrote in his Newsweek column shortly after 9/11: “Nobody said this was going to be pretty.”

But nobody ever said it would get this ugly, either! As if the calls for torture and the claims that prosecution will “be too hard legally and politically and too easy morally” weren’t infuriating enough, we now find the latest media/torture depredation: The Philadelphia Inquirer has had torture architect John Yoo on its payroll as a columnist since last year!

Maybe not all the media:

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