H.R. 1352 and Outsourcing Torture

It's impossible to pick out just one...or even a handful...or even a dozen...of the most heinous revelations of the past seven years. But surely one of the most disgusting was the revelation that we were outsourcing torture by sending our prisoners of the "war on terror" to other countries who will do our torture for us. Now, its clear that, morally speaking, there is no difference between doing A yourself and hiring B to do it for you...unless, I suppose, as one might argue, that the latter is just a wee bit more loathsome in some hard-to-pin-down way. Perhaps because it reveals that you know that what you are doing is wrong. Perhaps also because it's such a laughably lame way of trying to insulate yourself from blame. I mean really. I don't know what's more disgusting, that these evil criminals thought that getting Saudi Arabia to do our dirty work for us would fool people into thinking that it wasn't that bad...or that they were right about it...

So here's H.R. 1352, the Torture Outsourcing Prevention Act. It doesn't look perfect, but in these times, we can't really hope for perfection.