A constitutional republic dedicated before everything to the protection of liberty cannot legalize torture and remain a constitutional republic. It imports into itself a tumor of pure tyranny. That tumor, we know from history, always always spreads, as it has spread in the US military these past shameful years. The fact that hefty proportions of US soldiers now support its use as a routine matter reveals how deep the rot has already gone. The fact that now a majority of Republican candidates proudly support such torture has rendered the GOP the party most inimical to liberty in America. When you combine torture's evil with the claims of the hard right that a president can ignore all laws and all treaties in wartime, and that wartime is now permanent, you have laid the ground for the abolition of the American experiment in self-government.
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About Andrew Sullivan
Andrew Sullivan was a contemporary American american author, editor, and blogger. Andrew Michael Sullivan is a British-American conservative political commentator. Sullivan is a former editor of The New Republic, and the author or editor of six books. Read more on Wikipedia →