Torture By Germany?

Rush Limbaugh was discussing torture yesterday with Andy McCarthy, former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who led the prosecution of the terrorists responsible for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and currently is a conservative columnist. He tries to draw a tortured (pun intended) analogy between the position of the Obama Administration toward torture condoned by the Bush Administration and its alleged position on the deportation of John Demjanjuk, who likely facilitated the murder of 29,000 Jews while he was a Nazi prison guard at the Sobibor death camp in southeastern Poland. Here is a portion of the exchange between McCarthy and the chairman of the Republican Party:

RUSH: Okay. So where we are here is that in terms of extraditing Demjanjuk, he's subjecting (sic) because the Germans (sic) going to torture him, our DOJ is saying, "No, they don't intend to torture him so they're not going to torture him." They're using the same reasoning that they're rejecting in the Yoo-Bybee memos?

McCARTHY: Exactly right. And basically what they're saying is even if Demjanjuk does inadvertently suffer severe pain and suffering from however he's treated by the Germans, our government is satisfied that that wouldn't be torture. Even if he's in exactly the pain he'd be in if they were trying to torture him, as long as they don't intend to do it. When Yoo and Bybee said that, the left went crazy and said, "They're trying to green light torture," but yet this is exactly the position the Obama administration has taken only about ten days ago.

Suppose you were listening and heard Rush say "he's subjecting because the Germans going to torture him...." and McCarthy say "if Demjanjuk does inadvertently suffer severe pain and suffering from however he's treated by the Germans" (emphasis mine). You would think that the German government either plans to torture the subject or will do so inadvertently (Limbaugh). You probably wouldn't know

In the order given this morning, a panel of three judges said Demjanjuk has failed to show he would be tortured in Germany. “At most he has offered speculation that German authorities may not adequately attend to his medical needs while he is in that country’s custody,” the decision said.

Removing Demjanjuk to Germany is not “likely to cause irreparable harm sufficient to warrant a stay of removal,” added the court, despite Demjanjuk’s claim that just flying him to Munich amounts to torture.

Demjanjuk’s family has repeatedly claimed that he is too sick and in too much pain to travel to Munich to face charges he assisted in war crimes during the Holocaust. Such transport would amount to torture and would violate an international treaty banning torture, Demjanjuk said in his petition to the appeals court.

Without having read news reports, you wouldn't know that the cruelty the attorney believes the man who is probably "Ivan the Terrible" might be subjected to is a plane ride from his home in Ohio to Germany. You might be misled into believing ("the left went crazy and said, 'They're trying to green light torture,' but yet this is exactly the position the Obama administration has taken only about ten days ago") that the Obama Administration is condoning behavior it condemns in the Bush Administration. And you wouldn't know that the government of Germany was not planning to employ such tactics as sleep deprivation, starvation, sexual abuse or humiliation, placing the individual in a dark box with insects, or waterboarding. And you probably wouldn't suspect that Rush and Tom were slandering the government of Germany precisely because Germany is a part of Europe, a frequent target of the Republican right, in part because Europe is such a large, somewhat amorphous entity that an attack would offend few people. And ironically, given the right's disingenuous attack on "political correctness," invoking the same tactic first employed by critics of the literature of "dead, white European males."

The question still remains about Rush Limbaugh: Does he know that he is wrong or does he really believe most of what he says?