The letters to the editorial page of the Philadelphia Inquirer are on fire. People are writing in, overwhelmingly opposed to the newspaper’s hiring of John Yoo as a columnist, the former Justice Department lawyer who helped write what’s come to be known as the torture memo that claimed the treatment of prisoners amounted to torture only if it caused the same level of pain as “organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death.”
WILL BUNCH: I think a problem going back to the Bush’s first term is the media normalizing torture, that makes something like torture, which not only is illegal under a law that was signed by Ronald Reagan, among others, but, is clearly immoral, to make this a kind of a one-hand-on-the-other-hand debate, like it’s something like mass transit funding or something like that. And it’s not.
I think newspapers have a role to reflect the moral positions of their community. Nobody would argue giving a regular monthly column to somebody who advocated something like racial discrimination, for example, or something like—that would be so far out of the mainstream. And I think we need to put torture in that same category.
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