Beginning Tomorrow Afternoon...

Michael Schiavo will begin torturing his wife to death. The moral bankruptcy of Mr. Schiavo and the immoral and incompetent Judge Greer has been written on thousands of times by writers better than I. While my friends on the right side of the moral spectrum see the evil of this clearly one must wonder, why the blindness of those on the left. Perhaps it has something to do with the malignant and illiberal form of modern liberalism which results from the philosophy of monsters like Peter Singer. I still stand by my evaluation of American liberal political belief;

It seems that, according to this modern, malignant form of liberalism, the only people that shouldn't be killed are murderers.

So, about using that word, "torture". If it should happen that someone should suggest torture in even the most urgent and potentially catastrophic of cases (the ticking bomb scenario), as Alan Dershowitz did, liberals worldwide would rise up in outrage. Is the use of the word "torture" correct or justifiable?

Andrew C. McCarthy thinks so. In an article published today in National Review Online he makes the case very clearly.

Torturing Terri Schiavo
She’d be better off if she were a terrorist.

A few months back, I wrote an article for Commentary arguing that we ought to reconsider our anti-torture laws. The argument wasn’t novel. It echoed contentions that had been made with great persuasive force by Harvard’s Professor Alan Dershowitz: that under circumstances of imminent harm to thousands of moral innocents (the so-called “ticking bomb” scenario), it would be appropriate to inflict, under court-supervision, intense but non-lethal pain in an effort to wring information from a morally culpable person — a terrorist known to be complicit in the plot.

As one might predict with such a third rail, my mail was copious and indignant. Opening the door by even a sliver for torture, I was admonished, was the most reprehensible of slippery slopes. No matter how well-intentioned was the idea, no matter the lives that might be saved, no matter how certain we might be about the guilt of the detainee, the very thought that such a thing might be legal would render us no better than the savages we were fighting.

Well, lo and behold, a court-ordered torture is set to begin in Florida on Friday at 1 P.M.

Torture?!? Really?

Yes!

It will not produce a scintilla of socially useful information. It will not save a single innocent life. It is not narrowly targeted on a morally culpable person — the torture-victim is herself as innocent as she is defenseless. It is not, moreover, meant to be brief and non-lethal: The torture will take about two excruciating weeks, and its sole and only purpose is to kill the victim [emphasis mine - ed.].

Why?

On Friday afternoon, unless humanity intervenes, the state of Florida is scheduled to begin its court-ordered torture-murder of Terri Schiavo, whose only crime is that she is an inconvenience. A nuisance to a faithless husband grown tired of the toll on his new love interest and depleting bank account — an account that was inflated only because a jury, in 1992, awarded him over a million dollars, mostly as a trust to pay for Terri’s continued care, in a medical malpractice verdict.
[emphasis mine - ed.]

And the response of the "compassionate Left™"?

In this instance, though, deafening is the only word for the silence of my former interlocutors — -civil-liberties activists characteristically set on hysteria auto-pilot the moment an al Qaeda terrorist is rumored to have been sent to bed without supper by Don Rumsfeld or Al Gonzales (something that would, of course, be rank rumor since, if you kill or try to kill enough Americans, you can be certain our government will get you three halal squares a day).

Not so Terri Schiavo. She will be starved and dehydrated. Until she is dead. By court order.

Go read the whole thing and see how this treatment compares to the treatment that actual terrorists who have been convicted of capital crimes and sentenced to death get, and pray for Terri.