It seems inconceivable to me that Bush's attorneys and the DOJ attorneys did not advise Bush that he was setting himself up for possibly prosecution under the Torture Convention.

Surely they must have warned him about this--that is the whole pupose of giving legal advice, to protect your client from adverse outcomes.

So the warnings must have been secret, and maybe he decided to go ahead regardless, believing that it was necessary to save the United States from something unthinkable like a dirty nuclear weapon in Manhattan or poisoning of the water supplies of major cities.

Would this make sense? No, but then Bush is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, so isn't it entirely feasible that he would have made boneheaded decisions imagining himself to be a hero willing to put his own personal freedom at risk?

It seems to me that cases in which it was decided not to prosecute would come more under the heading of competency to stand trial etc. For example in England Pinochet was released because he was deemed to be mentally incompetent to stand trial.

Bush would perhaps have an argument here. He could say that someone unknown to him had laced his coca-cola with rum, thus making his innocuous soda into a Cuba Libre that had rendered him unable to function in his normal brilliant fashion as a Decider.

Or supposing Hamas took a prominent American like Mrs. Clinton hostage. Perhaps the DOJ would swap Bush out for her instead of prosecuting him.

... for following up and elaborating on the points I brought up here a couple of weeks ago about the UN Convention on Torture.

Bush said:

So I ask what tools are available for us to find information from him and they gave me a list of tools, and I said are these tools deemed to be legal? And so we got legal opinions before any decision was made.

The absurd thing is that the Gonzales/Yoo memo was so childish that it could have been done by a middle-schooler and to the best of my knowledge omitted the obviously relevant fact that the US had prosecuted Japanese torturers for using waterboarding.

See Washington Post article Waterboarding Used To Be A Crime.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/02/AR2007110201170.html

Are these Republican attorneys really so stupid, or is it just that Bush couldn't get anyone to work for him who wasn't an imbecile?

Nice effort by Robinson, but one gets the impression that this was more a case of playing to the crowd than of bringing previously unnoticed grievances to the attention of the addressee.

For example:

O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will bless us with tears -- tears for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women in many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education...

Isn't this a teeny bit partisan in immediately pointing the finger at those who worship God's coworker Allah and their backward ways.

I know that the Taliban has been destroying schools that educate girls, which is utterly despicable, without question, but is this accurate that the girls are actually being raped for wanting an education, or are they just being forced into marriage regardless of whether they want an education or not?

So which are the many lands in which women are beaten and raped for wanting an education? I am not saying that it doesn't happen, but it doesn't seem to get a lot of attention in the media and even Google searching comes up blank.

Here in the US we seem to have the problem of a lot of young girls voluntarily becoming pregnant so as to AVOID getting an education. You would think Robinson would have also wanted to bring this matter to the attention of the Almighty, who is known to be greatly interested in matters pertaining to human reproduction.

Wasn't it Cheney who said: "We know they have WMD and we know where they are"?

In 2006, Vice President Dick Cheney denied that the practice (waterboarding) was torture and called it "a no-brainer for me.

Cheney's opinions are clearly worthless and should be disregarded. In any case what does he mean that it is a no brainer for him. Is he willing to be waterboarded by a congressional committee?