It is not an opinion that 'enhanced interrogation techniques' are torture. It is a legal fact. And it is also a legal fact that the president is a war criminal.
About this quote
- What does it mean?
- The speaker states that enhanced interrogation is legally defined as torture and labels the president a war criminal based on that fact.
- In plain terms
- It is a legal fact that these interrogation methods are torture and the president committed war crimes.
- What can you take from it?
- Legal definitions of torture apply regardless of political opinion.
Where it applies
Putting it to work
Questions to consider
- Can legal facts change political outcomes?
- Who holds leaders accountable for war crimes?
Another view
Political conclusions drawn from legal facts may be contested in actual courts.
More from Andrew Sullivan
There is no state more abject than the man broken on the waterboarding rack, or frozen to near death, or forced to stand for days on end, or hooded and strappe…
Permalink to quote #7 What al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein did was an extreme form of sadistic torture, the kind that psychopaths enjoy and inflict. But that does not make, say, freezin…
Permalink to quote #9 At home, the public has come to accept torture as a legitimate instrument of government, something that the Founding Fathers would have been aghast at. We have…
Permalink to quote #6
Related quotes
'Abu Ghraib is unbelievable in the innocent times of 1961. That we would torture people that way and on the instructions of the President of the United States …
Ramsey ClarkRamsey Clark quote #1 The First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment rights in the United States Constitution were being violated in Albany again and again - freedom of speech, freedo…
Howard ZinnHoward Zinn quote #4 There is no state more abject than the man broken on the waterboarding rack, or frozen to near death, or forced to stand for days on end, or hooded and strappe…
Andrew SullivanAndrew Sullivan quote #7