Emptywheel’s Marcy Wheeler, an independent journalist writing about national security and civil liberties reacts to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s CIA torture report. Torture was ineffective. Detailed shocking abuses. President Obama protecting office of the president. Same authorization used to justify drone strikes. Will CIA Director John Brennan make the appropriate changes?

Rebecca Gordon, Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Francisco and for the university’s Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good. She is the author of  Mainstreaming Torture Ethical Approaches in the Post 9/11 United States. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 reopened what many people in America had long assumed was a settled ethical question: Is torture ever morally permissible? Within days, some began to suggest that, in these new circumstances, the new answer was “yes.” Rebecca Gordon argues that September 11 did not, as some have said, “change everything,” and that institutionalized state torture remains as wrong today as it was on the day before those terrible attacks.

On The Fun Half: Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker wishes Jewish constituent ‘molotov’ in a letter. 2007 George Tenet interview on 60 Minutes, “we don’t torture people.” Has the ‘cromnibus’ crashed? Federal Government runs out of money in two days. Talking to your kids about politics. Your calls and IMs.

And keep the conversation going on our morning thread.

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