Waterboarding is not designed to kill anyone.  None of the other enhanced interrogation techniques that liberals are screaming about are designed to cause lasting damage or death.

The reality is that the “torture” that liberals are getting upset about would be called torture only in the First World; in the rest of the world, it would be considered a mild first step.

That doesn’t mean that enhanced interrogation techniques are acceptable or moral, but it does mean that they are a far cry from what most of the world thinks of when they hear the word “torture.”

On the other hand, there is a real torture epidemic in America.  Every year, around 12,000 Americans are legally tortured to death.  None of them is guilty of a crime, and, shockingly, people of color are much more likely to be victims than whites.  Blacks are nearly eight times as likely to be tortured to death than whites.

These are the unborn babies who are aborted after 20 weeks, when they can feel pain.

Such late-term abortions are done in one of two ways:

1) Dilation and evacuation (D&E): Where the unborn child is literally hacked to pieces without anesthetic

2) Saline abortion: Where a saline solution is injected into the womb, and the unborn child is poisoned.  Death can take as long as 24 hours, and the solution gives the unborn child burns over his or her entire body.  No anesthetic is used.

3) Digoxin injection: Where a massive heart attack is induced in the unborn child via the misuse of the drug Digoxin.

4) Partial-birth abortion: While this is illegal, it’s not possible to be sure it’s not being used due to the lax enforcement of laws related to abortion in America.  In this case, the baby is delivered, but when only the baby's head remains in the womb, a tool is used to mush up the unborn baby's brain.  Then the skull is crushed.

No reasonable person would contend that hacking a born person to bits, sticking a knife into his skull and mushing up his brain, or burning his entire body with caustic chemicals is not torture.  The Digoxin approach is supposedly designed to avoid the unborn suffering, but no one who’s had a heart attack has ever said it was pain-free, or that he didn’t suffer severe fear when it occurred.  Clearly, giving someone a heart attack is worse than making him afraid he might drown.

Yet the same liberal Democrats who are so eager to condemn the U.S. for scaring terrorists into revealing upcoming terrorist plots designed to murder women and children boast of their support for abortion, including the torture deaths of those unborn babies brutally killed after they can feel pain.

The incongruity is amazing.  Terrorists are trying to ensure that future attacks will succeed at killing thousands of innocent civilians while the unborn’s only crime is being unwanted.

If liberals really cared about torture and human suffering, they’d be all for banning abortions after 20 weeks, when science shows that the unborn suffer.  After all, why would any woman have to wait that long to decide to kill her unborn daughter?

But liberals don’t just fail to support such a ban; they actively work to defeat it.  Wendy Davis became a national Democratic figure because she filibustered a law that would make abortions after 20 weeks illegal.  Liberal Democrats were so enthralled with Wendy’s support for the torture of innocent unborn children that they poured in money to let Wendy run for the governor of Texas.

That’s because abortion is necessary to support the sexually hedonistic lifestyle that liberals tend to like.  They want to have sex without consequences.  But given that no form of contraception, other than abstinence, is 100% effective – the typical woman has a greater than 50% chance of an unwanted pregnancy over her sexually active life if she uses the Pill – free love leads to consequences liberals consider unacceptable.

On the other hand, liberals appear much less concerned with terrorists and the threat those terrorists pose to America.

If that were not the case, the Obama administration would not be following an approach apparently designed to enable Iran to get the atomic bomb, and Democrats would not be saying that terrorists should be able to hire high-priced lawyers and get all the rights Americans get in court.

It’s a good thing to have a national discussion on the issue of enhanced interrogation techniques; if Americans don’t want them used, they shouldn’t be used.  There are those who make a strong case that such techniques are not something free societies should employ.

Basically, good people can disagree about whether or not enhanced interrogation techniques are really torture and whether or not they should be used in extreme cases, but good people really can’t contend that torturing an unborn child to death is an acceptable thing to do.

It’s hypocritical in the extreme for liberal Democrats who support the torturing to death of the innocent unborn to condemn President Bush and those in the CIA who felt they had no other option than to use enhanced interrogation techniques on just a few mass-murdering terrorists.

You can read more of Tom’s rants at his blog, Conversations about the obvious, and feel free to follow him on Twitter.