Fuddy-Duddy Bush Lawyer Rains On Romney Middle East Torture Parties

There's this guy running for president, see, and he keeps yelling about "America" and "freedom" and how noble our pursuits are, and how barbaric and backwards and cruel our enemies are, and how "the values of this great land are those values that make us the greatest nation on earth," which sounds great, until you get reminded that the guy, Mitt Romney, duh, also wants to scoop up strangers in other countries and torture them because they look kinda shady, as decided by pretty much anybody who feels like it.

Freedom isn't free, you know, and a lot of the time it seems to look like the opposite of freedom actually, but don't worry, it's freedom.

From the New York Times  :

“We’ll use enhanced interrogation techniques which go beyond those that are in the military handbook right now,” he said at a news conference in Charleston, S.C., in December.

The campaign policy paper does not specify which techniques Mr. Romney should approve, saying more study was needed because Mr. Obama had “permanently damaged” the value of some by releasing memorandums detailing Bush-era techniques in April 2009.

Oh, good. Old Thumbscrews is only in favor of secret kinds of torture.

Speaking of secret torture, it's been an awful long time since we've heard from a Bush administration legal advisor:

"I think the likelihood of a return to waterboarding and other extreme interrogation techniques is — despite polls and Romney campaign statements – nill," wrote Jack Goldsmith, on Wednesday. "There are many reasons for this ... but the main one is that such techniques are now indisputably illegal."

Say it ain't so! You mean ... you mean to say that beating people and holding them down to pour water into their mouth and nose is... not so good? But what about the freeeedom ? Next thing you know Thumbscrews is going to start talking crazy about dungeons or something:

I don’t want the people that are carrying out attacks on this country to be brought into our jail system and be given legal representation in this country. I want to make sure that what happened to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed happens to other people who are terrorists... He went to Guantanamo, and he met GIs and CIA interrogators, and that's just exactly how it ought to be.

AH! Who was that monster speaking there, the one talking about how courts and justice are too good for terror suspects? Yeah, that was Thumbscrews again, back in 2007 . It was in the debate with John McCain in which Thumbscrews also repeatedly refused to answer a direct question about whether waterboarding was torture, because he wanted to ask McCain about it before he decided, and McCain was all like "Bro, it's torture ," and Thumbscrews was all, "Naaah."

And now the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel has reminded us how Mr. Romney proposes to be super tough for our national defense: All schmucks accused of terror could (and should , dammit) be subject to indefinite imprisonment, without legal representation, so they can be tortured, using techniques no one will talk about, because we are the good guys. [ ThinkProgress ]