I've been listening since 6 am on KPFA. One of the things the apologist witnesses and their Republican supporter congressmen keep coming back to is the need for tough measures when circumstances warrant them.

Although the Democrats and Larry Bensky, the radio host, implicitly take the position that torture is never warranted no matter how dangerous the threat, probably most reasonable people would feel that there are some exceptions to this if one is really seriously threatened. In other words, if your wife and children were being held by homicidal maniacs and you had the opportunity to save them by inflicting harm to one of the gang, you might well do it.

"Progressives" try to say that such arguments are just a diversion, that torture doesn't really work, and so forth, but they don't quite have an argument that works, when they start out by granting in advance that there really is a serious terrorist threat. The witnesses and sympathetic questioners today have several times today referrred to 9/11, even to "the holes in the ground that were still smoking" as the torture policies were decided. Although probably most of the listeners on Pacific today will not be impressed, even so many of them will be, if grudgingly, affected by reflecting on the need to keep us all safe from attack, and the public at large seems to be tacitly quite ready to trade torture for security.

My point is that if you start by granting the government version of 911, it is much more difficult to argue against torture, except on general moral grounds that many people will not find compelling when their lives are at stake. By agreeing with the official version, one cedes 90% of the argument, in many people's minds. If Larry allows some listener input, which he says he will do sometime during the broadcast, we should call in and make this point. In general, Pacifica, with the important exception of a few shows like Guns And Butter, refuses to look at questions about what happened on 911, and they really need to be challenged on it.

Fred W