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Chuck Schumer on 'torture:' 'do what you have to do'

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Right Side Politics Examiner

As the Democrat-controlled Senate conducts sanctimonious hearings on enhanced interrogation methods, several Senate Democrat leaders, including Conference Vice Chairman Charles Schumer, announced support for delaying any prosecutions of Bush administration interrogation methods until after the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence finishes investigating the issue.

This is a good time to recall what Schumer said abut torture at a June 8, 2004 Judiciary Committee hearing:

And I'd like to interject a note of balance here. There are times when we all get in high dudgeon. We ought to be reasonable about this. I think there are probably very few people in this room or in America who would say that torture should never, ever be used, particularly if thousands of lives are at stake. Take the hypothetical: If we knew that there was a nuclear bomb hidden in an American city and we believed that some kind of torture, fairly severe maybe, would give us a chance of finding that bomb before it went off, my guess is most Americans and most senators, maybe all, would say, "Do what you have to do." So it's easy to sit back in the armchair and say that torture can never be used. But when you're in the foxhole, it's a very different deal.
 

I wonder if Senator Schumer  would still say that today.

Is it not peculiar that despite all the hullabaloo the Democrats now raise about the enhanced interrogation methods, there is no record of any ranking Congressional Democrat objecting to the interrogation techniques when the Congress critters were briefed about the methods?

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, Right Side Politics Examiner

Dan Spencer has been blogging at, and as, California Yankee since 2003. He lives in Connecticut and practices law in New York. Here he will discuss the politics of the Right.

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