A little Sullivan for your morning

Andrew Sullivan responds to an email critcizing him for being naive in valuing the human rights of the terrorists:

A couple of responses. I believe in an aggressive fight against our enemy. I would have sent twice the number of troops to Iraq. I'd add a war-tax to gasoline. I would have expended whatever resources needed to find and kill Osama bin Laden. I'm in favor of an aggressive, dynamic, enterprising war against these barbarians. But I believe that part of that long war is continuing to insist on humane treatment of prisoners of war. And I believe that the laws of warfare need to be written and, if necessary, adjusted, to fight this new war. So I'd be happy to see the 1978 FISA law amended to make it easier to wiretap genuine security threats. I have no problem with the Swift program. I'd be happy to see enemy combatants detained indefinitely as prisoners of war, if so proved under a fair process.

Where I dissent is in the claim to grant the president extra-constitutional monarchical power to make this stuff up as he goes along, and to shred the Anglo-American principles of justice and war-making at the same time. I also believe that the United States must never torture any prisoner of war or enemy combatant, and must always treat them humanely. Real intelligence is gained by steady and long-term infiltration of terror networks, not crude torture of random individuals in dark cells. So let us fight by using our strengths - an executive whose errors are subject to checks from both judiciary and legislature and a free, robust press. That's a democracy's advantage in wartime over dictatorships - an openness to internal criticism and thereby correction. The results of one man deciding everything are already evident in the shambles of the Iraq invasion. We are better than that - and it befuddles me to see how little faith some "conservatives" now have in the procedures of constitutional democracy.

I don't have anything to add to what he says, other then I've been reading Sullivan for a while, and I savor the ability to read coherent writing specifically about this subject - the need to fight the war aggressively, but also with a fundamental respect for human rights, regardless of those rightholders inhumanity.

And for this argument, the man is repeatedly called a liberal. Kinda funny, eh? I may not agree with everything he has to say but I love to hear him say it.