Davis Proves That The Current Republican Party Are Far from "Conservatives."

I have spoken before of the difference between British Conservatives and the bunch of loons which currently make up the American Republican Party.

This is David Davis. He's about as Tory as it is possible to be; now listen to what he says about torture and try to imagine any member of the current Republican Party making such a statement.

AMY GOODMAN: You’re a conservative member of Parliament.

DAVID DAVIS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: So you’re known as someone who’s very tough on the war on terror.

DAVID DAVIS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: So, what brings you here?

DAVID DAVIS: Well, I don’t want the American government, the American administration, to be inadvertently involved in a cover-up. I want to see us defeat the terrorists. I want to see us defeat al-Qaeda. But we don’t do that by using methods like torture. And if we have been using methods like torture, as it appears we have, we need to know about it, and we need to stop it.

I mean, torture—torture is wrong for all sorts of reasons. It’s illegal. It’s immoral. It doesn’t work. It takes away the moral high ground. Most of the guys who fight in our special forces and our agents in our intelligence agencies want to think they’re on the side of right, not the side that tortures people. So it puts them in the wrong, too. It undermines their morale. And finally, it’s a fantastic propaganda working for the other side. I mean, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib have turned out to be the greatest propaganda weapons for al-Qaeda. Torture is another one, and we’ve got to put a stop to it. We’ve got to clean it out and make our decision as to how we’re going to run our war against terror, and we do that by using civilized methods, not barbarian ones.

The Conservatives in the UK are trying to ensure that we find out what exactly the British government's involvement in torture was. And Davis has come to the US to warn the Obama administration not to be complicit in covering up such a thing.

American Republicans are not only not trying to expose crimes of torture, but they have taken to arguing that "torture works".

I've said before that no British Conservative would dare to make the argument that the Dick Cheney's of this world make. And, bang on cue, David Davis takes to the US to argue the very opposite of his Republican counterparts.

What Americans regard as normal right wing discourse is regarded as lunacy in most other countries. These people are bampots. What's astonishing to me is that they are portrayed as if they are representing a conservative viewpoint.

This isn't conservatism. One only has to listen to David Davis to recognise how very far away from conservatism the American right wing have become.

Tags: David Davis, Republicans, Conservatives, Torture, War Crimes