Taughannock Falls

Taughannock Falls
from: althouse.blogspot.com

Sunday, October 7, 2007

Can't we all just get along?




I'm starting to get a little riled up! The nonsense that passes for political discourse in our times is so repulsive, that it's a struggle not to jump off the cliff with the rest of the lemmings driven mad by the cruel absurdity of it all. Barack Obama decides to forego an American flag lapel pin-- and the noise from the surrounding "controversy" nearly drowns out the stunning revelation that the White House has secretly continued the extensive use of torture, while renaming it "harsh interrogation tactics." The disturbing story recently appeared in the NY Times:

After the Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that the Geneva Conventions applied to prisoners who belonged to Al Qaeda, President Bush for the first time acknowledged the C.I.A.’s secret jails and ordered their inmates moved to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The C.I.A. halted its use of waterboarding, or pouring water over a bound prisoner’s cloth-covered face to induce fear of suffocation.
But in July, after a monthlong debate inside the administration, President Bush signed a new executive order authorizing the use of what the administration calls “enhanced” interrogation techniques — the details remain secret — and officials say the C.I.A. again is holding prisoners in “black sites” overseas. The executive order was reviewed and approved by Mr. Bradbury and the Office of Legal Counsel.
Douglas W. Kmiec, who headed that office under President Ronald Reagan
and the first President George Bush and wrote a book about it, said he believed the intense pressures of the campaign against terrorism have warped the office’s proper role.
“The office was designed to insulate against any need to be an advocate,” said Mr. Kmiec, now a conservative scholar at Pepperdine University
law school. But at times in recent years, Mr. Kmiec said, the office, headed by William H. Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia
before they served on the Supreme Court, “lost its ability to say no.”
“The approach changed dramatically with opinions on the war on terror,” Mr. Kmiec said. “The office became an advocate for the president’s policies.”
From the secret sites in Afghanistan, Thailand and Eastern Europe where C.I.A. teams held Qaeda terrorists, questions for the lawyers at C.I.A. headquarters arrived daily. Nervous interrogators wanted to know: Are we breaking the laws against torture?
The Bush administration had entered uncharted legal territory beginning in 2002, holding prisoners outside the scrutiny of the International Red Cross and subjecting them to harrowing pressure tactics. They included slaps to the head; hours held naked in a frigid cell; days and nights without sleep while battered by thundering rock music; long periods manacled in stress positions; or the ultimate, waterboarding.
Never in history had the United States authorized such tactics. While President Bush and C.I.A. officials would later insist that the harsh measures produced crucial intelligence, many veteran interrogators, psychologists and other experts say that less coercive methods are equally or more effective."


These secret memos "justifying" non-compliance with U.S. and international laws were all that Bush and his enablers needed-- to defy the expressed will of the American people and their representatives in Congress. They are also all that Congress should need to bring forward articles of Impeachment against our Commuter and Thief.

Democrats gain nothing trying to reason with these insane warmongers. They lose credibility if they compromise on core principles just to "make nice" w1th the Republican minority.

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