No,No!

So I'm watching Hardball last night, and yet another Republican yak was on claiming yet again that "We never tortured!" and that releasing photographs of those people we didn't torture, but only interrogated really, really seriously, would put our troops in danger, so we've got to suppress those photographs, and why does the ACLU hate American Troops so much that they want those photographs released before the War on Terra is Over?

Because this, apparently, is the new Line on the Right.

(1) No one ever got Tortured

(2) It was just Really Serious Interrogation

(3) Which was Necessary Back then in 2001-2002 to Keep Us Safe

(4) And if those Evil Terraists Find out What We Did (which Isn't Torture, no matter how many bruises or bloody wounds the victims have) They'll Kill us all!!!  Because THEY are EVIL!

(5) So anyone whining about law or rights should just shut up!  We don't need no stinking rights!  This is about Terra!

This misses the essential point, as anyone except a fascist could see: rights are not rights when they can be stripped from classes of people based on who that class of people might be.  If you can strip a right from a person because he is brown or he is foreign or he is of some religion you don't like this year, then neither he nor (guess what) you actually have anything like a right: you only have a privilege.

And if a privilege can be stripped from that class, or that guy, guess what: then it can be stripped from you and yours too, any time someone decides to do that.

So you might think it's a nifty think to torture the Muslim terrorists now, but wait until they come for the Fundamentalist Christians tomorrow, or the gun-toting Abortion Rights Activists, or the Feminists Vegetarians next time.

And if you don't want that world?  Send a check to the ACLU, because they're the ones who are standing between you and it, and as far as I can see, they are the only ones standing between us and that, right now.