Torture Cont'd [Jonah Goldberg]

Noah at Gideon's Blog is passionately against Bush's interrogation/torture program and he makes a good case for his position. But what I found most interesting — or at least new — is that he rightly points out the grotesque disconnect between a government willing to abuse — the best compromise word I can come up with — a handful of people but abjectly terrified to inconvenience in trivial ways large numbers of people at airports and the like, if that inconvenience is disproportionately distributed along ethnic, geographic or religious lines. He writes:

Finally, I am appalled that we are even considering legalizing torture while standing resolute in our refusal to apply appropriately targeted screening techniques at points of entry into the United States. This President has been willing to go the people demanding the right to declare anyone an enemy combatant and torture that person, but he is not willing to go the people and say that ethnicity, religion, age and sex should determine who is subject to more aggressive searches before he boards an airline. I can find no good excuse, and no good moral justification, for his preference in this regard. I wish the opposition party could oppose this bill in those terms, but unfortunately they will not. So I am left hoping they will successfully oppose it in whatever terms, because this bill should be opposed, and defeated.