Torture, Dissidents and Talking to Dictators

Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal today:

In New York this week, I asked a former Eastern European dissident who spent time in prison under the Communists: “If you were sitting in a cell in Cuba, Iran or Syria and saw this photo of a smiling American president shaking hands with a smiling Hugo Chávez, what would you think?” He said: “I would think that I was losing ground.”

Fair enough. Hugo Chavez isn’t my cup of tea either. But it’s hardly that unusual for American presidents to be photographed with autocrats and dictators. More importantly, however, if I were to ask a former Soviet dissident: “If you learned that the American government was waterboarding prisoners and using other techniques favoured by despotic regimes and that this policy was enthusiastically embraced by a hefty plurality of the American people and a majority of conservative pundits, what would you think?”