Opinion: In today’s pages: Torture porn, Malthusian misery, academia’s crackpots
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A.S. Hamrah asks why the White House’s torture policies sound sexually perverse:
In April, former CIA Director George Tenet appeared on ’60 Minutes,’ telling interviewer Scott Pelley -- between swigs from a tiny bottle of Evian and his insistent, repetitive bark that ‘we don’t torture people’ -- that the reason he has never personally seen the evidence of the interrogation techniques he refuses to talk about is because he is ‘not a voyeur.’Tenet’s reference to voyeurism -- which the dictionary defines as ‘the practice of obtaining sexual gratification by looking at sexual objects or acts, especially secretly’ -- would seem to imply that these unmentionable techniques are sexual in nature and therefore inappropriate. But Tenet can never know if that’s the case because he, not being a voyeur, claims never to have seen them. So why bring up voyeurism at all?
Colby College’s Paul Josephson says the nuclear industry has never proved itself, and columnist Niall Ferguson thinks Malthusian theory is set to make a come back, thanks to global population growth and dwindling resources. Columnist Gregory Rodriguez wonders why academia nurtures less-than-objective scholars like Ward Churchill.
The editorial board harshly critiques President Bush’s latest speech linking Iraq and Al Qaeda, and praises a City Council plan to create a dense downtown. The board also explores what might happen if the Supreme Court takes its first second amendment case in decades.
Letter writers take issue with Democrats’ abortion stance. Los Angeles’s Margaret Daugherty says, ‘For more than a generation, Democrats have stood for the principle that personal reproductive choices are not the business of government. Shame on any candidate who discards this principle purely to grub a few more votes.’