About a month ago, Mark Kleiman noted how extraordinary it is that conservatives “reject moral relativism and insist on the black-and-white difference between good and evil” except “when it comes to torture.” It has to be equally extraordinary when the director of the CIA does it, too.
Director Porter Goss sat down with Charlie Gibson on ABC’s Good Morning America this week and said, in all seriousness, that torture “is in the eye of the beholder.”
Gibson: Let me ask you about torture. You said the other day, “The CIA does not do torture.” Correct?
Goss: That is correct.
Gibson: How do you define it?
Goss: Well, I define torture probably the way most people would: in the eyes of the beholder. What we do does not come close because torture, in terms of inflicting pain or something like that, physical pain or causing a disability, those kinds of things that probably would be a common definition for most Americans, sort of, you know it when you see it, we don’t do that because it doesn’t get what you want.
Yeah, that ought to clear things up nicely.
Post Script: In the same interview, Goss, who told Time magazine earlier this year that he has an “excellent idea” about Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts, responded to a question about the difficulty in tracking down the most sought after terrorist masterminds in the world.
Gibson: Just in the last 24 hours I asked a number of people, “How do you judge the agency? And what’s the litmus test to judge the agency’s effectiveness now?” And they all said to me in differing forms, “Why can’t they find two men, bin Laden or al-Zarqawi?”
Goss: Well, primarily because they don’t want us to find them and they’re going to great lengths to make sure we don’t find them.
Oh, so that’s why.