I wonder if Philip Klein feels dirty when he writes sentences like these:

When I think of all of the lives that were shattered on 9/11, all of the fathers and sons and brothers and sisters who perished because of a deranged ideology that celebrates death, there’s no way in good conscience I could say that it’s worth suffering a repeat of that attack in order to protect a terrorist from waterboarding, sleep deprivation, or some of the other techniques that were employed.

He should. This is an irredeemably sentimental, emotionally manipulative and unhelpful argument. If this is Klein’s actual thinking on the issue, and not the finely-honed agitprop designed to enflame passions that I take it to be, he ought to take a big step back and go think about things in solitude for a while.

Put aside the ethical concerns if those don’t move you. Put aside the arguments (very convincing to me) that torture confessions are unreliable by their very nature. Why should we not allow our government to legally torture? Remember this? Remember domestic wiretapping? Yes, Malkin’s concerns of being persecuted are self-important and paranoid, but the lesson is clear: don’t give the government powers you’d never want turned against you. You’d think conservatives would have internalized this sentiment by now.

The sad fact of the matter is that even if torture was 100% reliable and ethically unproblematic, people would still die at the hands of terrorists. The world is too big and complex, the blindspots too many to count, and human ingenuity too great for any regime to prevent gruesome attacks on its populace. So in a world where the government cannot protect its citizens reliably, we have to ask ourselves whether we want to grant legal amnesty to an all too human, fallible and fickle institution to torture people.

I, for one, do not.