Greg Grandin: Why Latin America Didn't Join Washington's Counterterrorism Posse;

As many of you know, Tom Dispatch was inaccessible to most computers late last week. We were, it seems, overwhelmed by our own popularity. Too many prospective readers did in TD. We are now hard at work strengthening the site, but this may take a while. In the meantime, we are attempting to post on a somewhat more limited basis, beginning today. Our apologies to all frustrated TD readers! Personally, I couldn't be happier to be back. Tom. There was a scarcely noted but classic moment in the Senate hearings on the nomination of John Brennan, the president's counter terrorism "tsar," to become the next CIA director. When Senator Carl Levin pressed him repeatedly on whether water  boarding was torture, he ended his reply this way: "I have a personal opinion that water boarding is reprehensible, and should not be done, and again, I am not a lawyer, senator, and I can't address that question." How modern, how twenty first century American! How we've evolved since the dark days of Medieval Europe, when water boarding fell into a category known to all as "the water torture"! Brennan even cited Attorney General Eric Holder, as one lawyer, who had described water boarding as "torture," but he himself begged off. According to the man who was deputy executive director of the CIA, and director of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center in the years of "enhanced interrogation techniques" and knew much about them, the only people equipped to recognize torture definitely as torture are lawyers. This might be more worrisome, if we weren't a "nation of lawyers" though it also means that plummeting law school application rates could, in the future, create a torture definition crisis. To look on the positive side, Brennan's position should be seen as a distinct step forward from that of the Justice Department officials under the Bush administration, who wrote the infamous "torture memos", and essentially left the definition of "torture" to the future testimony of the torturer. "If a defendant has a good faith belief that his actions will not result in prolonged mental harm, he lacks the mental state necessary for his actions to constitute torture."