"We're All Torturers Now"

In a compelling op-ed published in the New York Times, Mark Danner says that our government's selection of Alberto Gonzales as attorney general is the ultimate endorsement of his position that torture is okay -- as long as Americans are doing it. Danner calls the storyline of this scandal troubling:

"Wrongdoing is exposed; we gaze at the photographs and read the documents, and then we listen to the president's spokesman 'reiterate,' as he did last week, 'the president's determination that the United States never engage in torture.' And there the story ends."

But he argues that "by using torture, the country relinquishes the very ideological advantage -- the promotion of democracy, freedom, and human rights -- that the president has so persistently claimed is America's most powerful weapon in defeating Islamic extremism."

Danner is the author of Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror.