Darth Cheney pops up again on Hannity - where else? - to accuse the Obama administration of being weak and worthless, now drop and give me twenty.
(Incidentially, you know as well as I do that Cheney would have been president of Omega House. Why the wingers like people whom normal humans loathe in real life […]

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If Rush Limbaugh wants to convince the nation that waterboarding isn’t torture, Rush Limbaugh should allow himself to be waterboarded - live, on national television, for the world to see.
Pay-per-view, for his favorite charity. Conservatives would watch to see themselves vindicated. Liberals would watch just to see Rush waterboarded.

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I’m here five minutes and already I’ve got an e-mail from a winger correspondent informing me that Obama is “on the ropes” because Dick Cheney is telling Sean Hannity that torture works, and presumably we should torture even more people.
Never saw that one coming.

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Obama released the torture memos yesterday. Right-wingers are… wait for it… OUTRAGED!
I haven’t written at length on this issue because, among other reasons, I can understand how this country might have gone overboard in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. But of course what we’re talking about here is policy specifically crafted to free us from […]

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Wow.

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Sort of amazed by this, but by now I shouldn’t be.
O’Reilly and his ilk continue to maintain that waterboarding isn’t torture, despite the fact that after WWII the U.S. prosecuted several Japanese soldiers for waterboarding U.S. servicemen. It was a war crime then. So what’s changed?
Well, obviously the fact that the “good guys” are using […]

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In a fascinating piece, Christpher Hitchens lets himself be waterboarded and comes to the conclusion:
if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.
But as part of his piece, he provides a very good summation of the argument for waterboarding; or at least the view of those who would dismiss the […]

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Sweet:
WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”
What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had […]

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Nice:
The U.S. military hid the locations of suspected terrorist detainees and concealed harsh treatment to avoid the scrutiny of the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to documents that a Senate committee released Tuesday.
It’s unclear from the documents whether the Pentagon moved the detainees from one place to another or merely told the ICRC […]

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“Cheney, others OK’d harsh interrogations“
“Harsh interrogations.”
Did you know, following World War II we actually sentenced several Japanese soldiers for waterboarding Americans? Then, we called it torture and a war crime.
Now, Teh Terrorists are out to get us. And when we do it - well, it simply can’t be a war crime.
But I like how the […]

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Via Atrios, Scott Horton writes about the Yoo torture memo and the ultimate effects:
The memo was authored by John Yoo. This memorandum was designed to authorize the introduction of torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading interrogation techniques to be used upon prisoners held at Guantánamo, and ultimately also used in Afghanistan and Iraq. The […]

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Pertinent to this discussion, Sullivan asks today:
To put it more bluntly: It seems to me that those who are making a fine distinction between “torture” and even waterboarding - and allowing waterboarding - have no logical basis for objecting to what we saw in many of the photographs at Abu Ghraib. Or rather their only […]

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Sullivan on how the AP’s use of the term “harsh interrogation treatment” to describe what was on those CIA tapes:
No serious source denies that these two individuals were - at the very least - waterboarded. And no serious, reasonable student of history, warfare or basic ethics can deny that waterboarding is now and always has […]

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And as a measure of how far we’ve come, I saw this headline and my first thought was: Is it one of ours?

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The destruction of the torture tapes may yet turn out to be the biggest story/scandal to bedevil the White House. Now a House panel - controlled by spineless Democrats, remember - has prepared subpoenas to force CIA officials to testify about the destruction of the videotapes.
The House Intelligence Committee’s threat marked the second challenge to a White […]

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Bush administration to judge: We didn’t really have to preserve those CIA tapes. And don’t you be asking about it.

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Would it be torture then? Gitmo legal advisor refuses to answer.

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Kevin Drum wonders what’s on those tapes the CIA destroyed. Actually, he notes, we don’t have to wonder - it’s been alluded to before:
Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be….Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, […]

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Torture tapes? Uh, looks like the Dog Ate My Homework:
The CIA destroyed videotapes it made in 2002 of two top terror suspects because it was afraid that keeping them “posed a security risk,” Director Michael Hayden has told agency employees.
A risk to the CIA is more like it.
Look. If the United States doesn’t torture, as […]

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Seriously.
In response to a question during a speech at the University of Colorado last night, Ashcroft said he’d be willing to do it:
The first question came from a woman who asked if Ashcroft would be willing to be subjected to waterboarding.
“The things that I can survive, if it were necessary to do them to me, […]

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