Scott Brown, the New "I Love Torture" Senator

by Michael Jones · 2010-01-20 14:52:00 UTC
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Scott BrownRemember in 2004 when Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe said that Abu Ghraib really wasn't such a big deal? Or when Texas Sen. John Cornyn pushed Attorney General Eric Holder to adopt a Jack Bauer-style set of rules for prosecuting terror detainees?

Today, Sen. Inhofe and Sen. Cornyn must be smiling. Because yet another torture advocate has joined the halls of Congress -- the new Massachusetts Senator, Scott Brown.

Lots of folks are playing the role of pundit today, wondering if Brown's election means the end of health care reform, the end of advances in gay rights, or the end of immigration reform. They're right to speculate, but last night's election of Sen.-Elect Brown has an even scarier implication: Have voters gone back to thinking that torture is good policy?

To hear Brown's own campaign say it, the answer is a definitive yes. One of his campaign's top advisors, Eric Fehrnstrom, said that national security played a bigger part in this election than any other issue. And that means that progressives, and the White House, have lost ground on the question of whether torture is immoral.

Given where we've been for the past decade, from Abu Ghraib to GITMO, that's scary.

Fehrnstrom told Politico that voters resonated with Scott Brown's call to try folks like the Christmas Day underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in military courts, and agreed with Brown's assertion that waterboarding is just another word for effective interrogation.

"National security was a more potent issue than healthcare based on the polling we saw, on dealing with terrorists as ordinary criminals versus enemy combatants," Fehrnstrom said. Is this 2002 again?

It might be. Scott Brown's line justifying his position on waterboarding and harsh interrogation techniques rings right out of a post-9/11 column by Ann Coulter. "It's time we stopped acting like lawyers and started acting like patriots," Brown said.

That sentence should be criminal. Instead, it won someone a U.S. Senate seat, in one of the bluest states in the entire country. Couple that with the fact that 58 percent of the country thinks that we should be waterboarding folks like Abdulmutallab, and the future of torture in the United States is looking pretty darn good right now.

And that may prove to have global implications far beyond just losing a 60th seat in the U.S. Senate.

Photo credit: State Senator Scott Brown

Michael Jones
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