Witness: "You want the truth? You can't handle the truth! I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it!"

Prosecutor: "Did you order the torture?"

Witness: "You're goddamn right I did!!

What happens next, where they clear the courtroom and haul him away under arrest, that's a scene I'm looking forward to indeed.

His smile, hair and support for liberal causes makes him a celebrity in Northern California and a lightning rod for scorn in Southern California.

I've got news for you, Newsom is an object of scorn for lots of Northern Californians also. Here's a glowing "endorsement" from the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the local progressive paper. Hint: those quotation marks around the word endorsement are for a reason, the piece is satire.

Having said that, I think all the moralizing about having affairs is funny, amazing how preachy people get when statistics show that huge percentages engage in infidelity also. It's always someone else, I know. In any case it's the least of the problems people have with Newsom up here.

Surely, it is difficult to say anything positive about torture. Surely, a slippery slope. Clearly, there is another side of this story.

So, you understand that torture is appallingly criminally bad, that it goes against everything we believe, that it reduces us to the same moral standing as terrorists in which case what's the point, I mean we lose all justification for combating them at all except "we're bigger".

You understand this, you say, but you think reporting that it was not only used by our government, but planned in advance, is something that shouldn't be done, that doing so is somehow slanted?

As far as "the other side of the story" don't worry, most of the news media is busy putting out that part. I don't know if you noticed, but that's how we got into Iraq in the first place. See New York Times, Miller, Judith, for just one example.

This is big stuff. It's getting attention because it deserves it.

But maybe we could take a break from our moral outrage over how Rumsfeld treated Iraqis to contemplate the fact that he, repeatedly and without shame or remorse, violated the right that every soldier has to the complete and unequivocal support of the government that sends him into harm's way.

Right, because I've never seen a story about the lack of armor and other failings of the Bush Administration in regards to soldiers in Iraq.

Sorry, but this strikes me as disingenuous evasion of the topic at hand. Our government not only condoning but directing torture is criminal and tragic for many, many reasons, and yes what it put the soldiers through is one of them. However the idea that anyone should stem the moral outrage at the fact that torture was carried out, for any reason, sounds like some attempt to change the subject.

Torture was carried out in lots of places, apparently, by the way, not just that prison. That's the story that just came out, that it was not only carried out, but planned. And if you don't think that's worth reporting, followed by outrage, then you're wrong.

Yep, Bill-E-Bob P, making murderous criminals uncomfortable, frightened & embarrassed in order to possibly save the lives of innocents

Do you actually not understand that one of the reasons that we don't condone torture is because we have a system of laws that require us to make legal decisions before just deciding that someone is a "murderous criminal"?

Or are you condoning torture only for what, captives who have already been through the process and been convicted, found guilty? If so, that's another proposal that would fall more under the purview of what constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, which is a different debate entirely.

What people like you seem to be proposing (I'm never quite sure, one has to guess) is that it's perfectly acceptable if it's a "wartime" scenario, which is where you presumably get the idea that these are "murderous criminals" which we can decide with no legal process whatsoever. In that case, the idea seems to be that the US takes captives on the battlefield, and then subjects them to torture, and that this is all fine! Great! Because well, it's war and we've always been like that in war.

What a sick, twisted view of our country you seem to have.

We don't torture. This is our moral, legal, and historic code of behavior. We don't fly planes into buildings either, murder of civilians isn't in our code of behavior either. To say that one is suddenly acceptable because the other happened is sheer idiocy.

If we torture, then we lose all reason to be fighting terrorists in the first place except "we're bigger than they are".

We despise terrorists because they kill civilians, which we find morally reprehensible. If we become morally reprehensible ourselves, then what's the point? All we've got then is "we have more money and power so we win". If that's our only justification, if we're as morally lacking as the terrorists, then why should we even win?

People in our government admitted that this was torture when other countries engaged in it. Now they've admitted that they did it too, with all the blithering and equivocating defense of it.

Flying airplanes into buildings full of civilians is criminal and morally reprehensible. So is torturing captives. The fact that one occurred doesn't make the other suddenly acceptable.