The Newt Speaks, Must We Listen?

From Gingrich: 'Absolute obligation' to investigate Pelosi:

Pelosi said the briefing she received from the CIA was incomplete and inaccurate, and she called on the CIA to release a full transcript of the briefing. She also accused Republicans of jumping on reports of the briefings to cause a distraction.

"She is a trivial politician, viciously using partisanship for the narrowest of purposes, and she dishonors the Congress by her behavior," Gingrich also said in the blistering interview.

"Speaker Pelosi's the big loser, because she either comes across as incompetent or dishonest. Those are the only two defenses," he continued.

The Newt thinks that Pelosi should be investigated, yet he has never called for an investigation of Bush and Cheney?

I’m not a big fan of Nancy Pelosi. Impeachment belonged on the table. Perhaps the Newt is right about her. However, let me share my thoughts on the Newt. Is he any better than Pelosi? He is a trivial politician, viciously using partisanship for the narrowest of purposes. He dishonors the Congress by his behavior. He’s a big loser, because he either comes across as incompetent or dishonest. Those are the only two defenses for the Newt.

Waterboarding Is Not Torture, Unless It Happens To You?

Can Bush, Cheney, Limbaugh, Coulter, et al, be next? Pretty please.

From Mancow Waterboarded, Admits It's Torture by Ryan Pollyea:

And so it went Friday morning when WLS radio host Erich "Mancow" Muller decided to subject himself to the controversial practice of waterboarding live on his show.

Mancow decided to tackle the divisive issue head on -- actually it was head down, while restrained and reclining.

"I want to find out if it's torture," Mancow told his listeners Friday morning, adding that he hoped his on-air test would help prove that waterboarding did not, in fact, constitute torture.

Turns out the stunt wasn't so funny. Witnesses said Muller thrashed on the table, and even instantly threw the toy cow he was holding as his emergency tool to signify when he wanted the experiment to stop. He only lasted 6 or 7 seconds.

"It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that's no joke,"Mancow said, likening it to a time when he nearly drowned as a child. "It is such an odd feeling to have water poured down your nose with your head back...It was instantaneous...and I don't want to say this: absolutely torture."

"I wanted to prove it wasn't torture," Mancow said. "They cut off our heads, we put water on their face...I got voted to do this but I really thought 'I'm going to laugh this off.' "

Last year, Vanity Fair writer Christopher Hitchens endured the same experiment -- and came to a similar conclusion. The conservative writer said he found the treatment terrifying, and was haunted by it for months afterward.

A Civilian Court Would Never Admit Evidence Gained Through A Coerced Statement

From Lawyer fears 9/11 mastermind trial will be 'insanity' By Kelli Arena and Carol Cratty:

Prescott Prince is a small-town lawyer who has never taken a death penalty case to trial. Yet he finds himself involved in one of the biggest capital punishment cases this century: He's defending the alleged mastermind of the September 11 terror attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

He readily acknowledges how his client is perceived as "one of the most reviled people" in the world. But he says it's imperative that America give Mohammed a fair trial, just like anyone else accused of a crime.

No civilian court, he says, would accept confessions obtained after a defendant was mistreated. But the CIA admits Mohammed was waterboarded, a controversial interrogation technique that involves simulated drowning.

"I take the position that this is mock execution. ... Colloquially speaking, at least it's torture," Prince said.

The fact that whatever Mohammed said during such duress could be used at trial is alarming to Prince.

"That's not the rule of law. That's just insanity."

Bad Apples And Big News

A great This Modern World cartoon by Tom Tomorrow here.

Take Action Against The Immoral Bush Administration

From ACLU Calls for Independent Counsel After Torture Admissions; Will Anyone Pay Attention? by Jonathan Stein:

I don't quite understand how the media let out a collective yawn when it heard the news that top Bush Administration officials (Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Ashcroft, Tenet) personally signed off on "enhanced interrogation techniques" that included pushing, slapping, sleep deprivation, waterboarding, and other tactics. Waterboarding is torture, remember?

I'm further confused by the fact that the media remained passive after President Bush admitted that he knew and approved of what his principals were doing. This should have been huge news — the tactics the Administration's top officials approved probably violated the Geneva Conventions, after all — and yet this was less important than "Dog Finds Way to Owner's Funeral"?

Call on your members of Congress to demand an independent prosecutor.

I Hate George W. Bush

What is wrong with this man? How can he be so morally bankrupt? Where is the outrage over what he has done this past weekend?

Over the weekend President Bush vetoed a bill which would have limited CIA interrogators to the 19 techniques allowed in the 2006 Army Field Manual. This would have prohibited waterboarding and several other techniques from being used.

Here is more on this from A president's shameful legacy which was published on March 10, 2008 in The Independent:

Whether such techniques constitute "torture" or not (and the Bush administration is pretty much alone in believing that they do not), the dishonesty of the President's position is glaring. He claims that the bill "would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror" and argues "this program has produced critical intelligence that has helped us prevent a number of attacks". If such techniques are so useful, why did he consent to a previous bill in 2005 that outlawed their use by military, as opposed to CIA, personnel?

Moreover, Mr Bush provides no evidence to support his argument that such techniques have yielded results. In fact, all the evidence points the other way. The CIA publicly admitted last month that it water-boarded three terror suspects between 2002 and 2003 and recorded the sessions. But now those tapes have mysteriously been destroyed. If the information gleaned from these interrogations was so manifestly "critical", is it conceivable that they would have been destroyed?

The President shows no signs of understanding the damage done by giving free rein to interrogators. It is a sure-fire way to produce gross prisoner abuses of the sort we saw at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad. Mr Bush may claim until he is blue in the face that "we do not torture", but torture is exactly what his administration has facilitated with its disgracefully relaxed attitude to constraining interrogators.

This latest veto by Mr Bush is another example of a recurrent theme in his Presidency: a disregard for the international rule of law and a fatal indifference to how America is viewed by the rest of the world. This self-declared patriot who wraps himself in the Stars and Stripes at every opportunity has actually done as much as any American in recent years to undermine the values his country claims to stand for.

Mike Huckabee Is The Next In Line To Waterboard

"I'm finding out just how long I can go sleep deprived. You know, running for office is sort of like being waterboarded, I think." Mike Huckabee

There is one way to give Mr. Huckabee the information he needs to make a more certain statement about the similarities and differences between the lack of sleep and waterboarding. WATERBOARD HIM! After all, a future president should know these things, right? Oh, never mind, since our current president doesn’t know, and most of our so-called “leaders” don’t know either.

Instead of presidential debates, let’s have a presidential waterboarding contest.

Seriously, where is the outrage over all of the recent comments from so many “prominent” people concerning waterboarding? These people are saying that waterboarding is not torture and is not illegal. How can Mike Huckabee joke about this? This man is as deranged as George W. Bush, who joked about missing WMDs. Both men profess to be Christians. Would Jesus waterboard someone? Would Jesus make jokes about waterboarding? I am outraged over the lack of outrage!

Let's Waterboard Joe Lieberman Too

Joe Lieberman! Get in line! It’s getting to be a long line. So many “compasionate conservatives” say that waterboarding is like a walk in the park, that I think we should have them all be publicly waterboarded. You know, just for fun, and for some real “reality” TV. After all waterboarding doesn't really hurt anyone.

This is what Joe said after voting against a bill prohibiting waterboarding:

It is not like putting burning coals on people's bodies. The person is in no real danger. The impact is psychological.

John "Hypocrite" McCain

John “The Tri-Bomber” McCain has said that waterboarding is torture and that it is illegal. Last Wednesday, however he voted against Democratic-sponsored legislation supported by anti-torture advocates that sought to ban waterboarding and other coercive tactics by the CIA.

From the WashingtonPost.com website:

McCain's vote prompted disappointment among civil liberties and human rights advocates, who have frequently been allied with McCain on detention and interrogation issues. "It's not as if the Bush administration has given us any new reason to trust them on this issue," said Elisa Massimino, Washington director for Human Rights First. "The only thing that seems to have changed is that an election is looming closer."

The Law As Quickstep Will Doom Us All

Equality. Isn’t that what America is all about? The rule of law should be the same for all of us. It’s not, and it never has been. But, it is getting worse and worse under the Bush administration. Thanks to Dahlia Lithwick for writing such an excellent article over at Slate called Anybody's Guess.

It's been a banner week for water-boarding. This centuries-old practice of simulated drowning to extract false confessions and false testimony has really benefited of late from a good old legal reassessment and a smoking-hot PR campaign. In the course of a few short years, water-boarding has morphed from torture that unquestionably violates both federal and international law to an indispensable tool in the fight against terror.

We as Americans are doomed if this continues. The threat is not from terrorists, but from our own government. Laws don’t mean anything anymore to the rich and powerful. If you want to you can go ahead and break the law. Then just follow these easy steps:

First, the administration breaks the law in secret. Then it denies breaking the law. Then it admits to the conduct but asserts that settled law is not in fact settled anymore because some lawyer was willing to unsettle it. Then the administration insists that the basis for unsettling the law is secret but that there are now two equally valid sides to the question. And then the administration gets Congress to rewrite the old law by insisting it prevents the president from thwarting terror attacks and warning that terrorists will strike tomorrow unless Congress ratifies the new law. Then it immunizes the law breakers from prosecution.

We are doomed if this attack on the rule of law continues unchecked in the future. Congress bears as much responsibility for this as the Executive branch.

This is not MY America:

Enter the new attorney general, Michael Mukasey, with the promise that he would neither investigate nor prosecute the people who tortured, since they relied on (secret) Justice Department authorization to do so. The second was to establish clearly and unequivocally that the question of whether water-boarding was illegal in 1968, legal in 2002, illegal again in 2006, and perhaps legal again tomorrow will be determined by the president and nobody else. In secret.

No one should be above the law, and that includes the FBI, CIA, and the Executive branch of the government.

We are little scaredy-cats, we are blind and we are doomed:

This is not simply the theory of a unitary executive at work; this isn't the notion that the president makes the law, and acts of Congress are legal elevator music. This vision of executive power is that the law not only emanates from the president but also ebbs and flows with his hunches, hopes, and speculations, on a moment-to-moment basis. What we are hearing now from senior Bush administration officials is that if the president thinks someone looks kinda like a terrorist and the information sought from him seems kinda worth getting, it will be legal to torture him. And it's legal no matter who justified it, regardless of the supporting legal doctrine, because, well, the president just had a feeling that the information would prove valuable.

The first step we should take is to stop calling the situation in Iraq a war. The phrase “The War on Terror” should be abolished. The situation in Iraq is an occupation by U.S. armed forces. If Bush is no longer a “wartime president” he will lose some of his power. We need for that to happen.

I'm sure there's some law professor out there who can make the legal argument that executive power in wartime encompasses even the reckless guesses and impressionistic whims of a single man, as they arise. At which point, that too will become an "open question" on which "reasonable people will differ." And the dance will begin again.

We are doomed as long as this dance continues. Somebody stop the music.

Bogus "Real-Life"

However, the torture is real:

The scenario was like a real-life episode of "24," the official said. Ultimately, the nuclear threat proved bogus.

Let's Waterboard Tony Fratto, Too!

After all, it’s not really torture, we don’t do no stinking torture. Waterboarding is A-OK:

Fratto also apparently used the administration's it's not torture because "we do not torture" line. And "torture is illegal" and this was deemed legal therefore it's not torture.

Even More To Waterboard

After all, it’s not really torture, and besides, everybody does it. Let Tom Toles show you.

More To Waterboard

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain could be added to the list of people who should be waterboarded for not voting against Michael Mukasey. They skipped the vote. They should be doing their jobs in the Senate, instead of running around the country trying to get elected as President. They should put the good of our country before their own selfish ambitions. I would vote for someone whose actions speak louder than their words.

Let Congress Waterboard Bush And Cheney

George W. Bush says, “We do not torture”. We do waterboard however, or at least we used to. Is waterboarding torture? Some people like Tom Ridge say yes and others like Michael Mukasey say no (or is that maybe, well if it’s done to him it is.) I guess it’s not if it’s done to somebody else. Porter Goss says he doesn’t know, yet John McCain describes it as a "very exquisite torture". Confused yet? I have a solution. Let Congress waterboard Bush and Cheney. Then ask them if they think it’s torture.

Then let’s waterboard New York Senator Chuck Schumer, who voted FOR Mukasey, who is now “disappointed” in the attorney general’s responses about waterboarding. Please, please, please, Senator Schumer, stop caving in to the Bush administration and let’s have some accountability. Enough with the nice words, let’s have some action!