Category Archive

Torture is illegal. It should be illegal. It should stay illegal. Now, torture supporters are all over the place saying, "But what about the 'ticking time bomb' scenario?"  That refers to the hypothetical situation where we know that a dirty bomb is about to go off in the center of some major city, and we have some terrorist suspect in … Read More

The party of spreading fear is at it again.  In fact, they've pulled out the stops with this new video: Senate Republicans get bonus points for using Carl Orff's 'O Fortuna' (one of my faves), but beyond that, how stupid is this argument? Did they forget that the one thing America does pretty darn well is imprison people? Or do … Read More

Jonathan Chait reflects back on the late 1990's when the conservative right was all about "the rule of law": The Republican sensibility was best reflected by the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which not only crusaded for impeachment but demanded, in 2001, that Bill Clinton be indicted even after leaving office. The Journal rejected the logic of promoting healing and … Read More

Pew Survey: The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey. *** White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified — more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least … Read More

Condi Rice, speaking to students at Stanford University: Q: Is waterboarding torture? RICE: The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations under the Convention Against Torture. So that's — And by the way, I didn't authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency, that they had policy … Read More

Michael Goldfarb in the (conservative) Weekly Standard writes: Tonight President Obama said he was "absolutely convinced" that he had made the right decision in putting an end to the use of the harsh interrogation techniques employed by the Bush administration. After eight years of President Bush, it certainly is refreshing to have a leader who doesn't let himself become entangled … Read More

For a couple of weeks now, right-wingers have been all upset about a report issued by the Homeland Security Office which makes the argument that right-wing extremists are potentially dangerous, and we should watch them.  Example of this include Timothy McVeigh and Eric Rudolph, who committed acts of terrorism in Oklahoma City and at the Olympics in Atlanta, respectively. Somehow, … Read More

Peggy Noonan, December 21. 1998: "The Democrats had long labeled the impeachment debate a distraction from the urgent business of a great nation. But the Republicans argued that the pursuit of justice is the business of a great nation. In winning this point, they caught the falling flag, producing a triumph for the rule of law, a reassertion of the … Read More

Outstanding column today: [T]here are indeed immense challenges out there: an economic crisis, a health care crisis, an environmental crisis.  Isn’t revisiting the abuses of the last eight years, no matter how bad they were, a luxury we can’t afford? No, it isn’t, because America is more than a collection of policies. We are, or at least we used to be, … Read More

Can we all at least agree that "torture" doesn't become "not torture" by virtue of the fact that the victim provides information? President Bush got on the world stage and said, "We do not torture".  Now, it is beyond all doubt that we did conduct torture.  The response from Bush defenders (and Cheney himself) is that we got good information … Read More

Bush/Rumsfeld/Cheney wanted to find links betweel al Qaeda and Iraq, so they could make their case to the American people that invading Iraq was a proper response to 9/11.  They didn't have any evidence of links, but they wanted their Iraq War, so they tried to get that "evidence" out of terrorist suspects….by torture: A former senior U.S. intelligence official … Read More

* Marc Theissen writes a WaPo op-ed reminding us that, despite our outrage, "The CIA's Questioning Worked".  No, he just can't bring himself to call it "torture".  And as for it "working", Theissen writes: Specifically, interrogation with enhanced techniques "led to the discovery of a KSM plot, the 'Second Wave,' 'to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner … Read More

So now we know that waterboarding was used 266 times on two terrorist suspects.  183 of those times were on Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described planner of 9/11, in one month. The Bush administration euphemistically used waterboarding as an "enhanced interrogation technique", but when you hear that it was used 183 times in one month, a couple of common sense … Read More

For years, Bush assured the nation that "we did not torture". Today, Obama released four legal memos which helped to describe what "interrogation techniques" we did use.  Apparently, according to news reports, the decision to release the memos was a tough one for Obama, and one he did not take lightly.  He saw the virtues of government transparency but had to … Read More