Thank you Michael Ratner and Sara Miles for this great article. No one should ever have to experience torture, not even those who think we should do it to keep us safe. I do have one quibble:

"[O]ur government, flawed as it is, has launched crusades against human rights abusers abroad and helped prevent terrible suffering by demanding that torture stop. Now we are facing a new world: one in which the most powerful country on the planet publicly declares itself above the laws that have protected individuals everywhere from disappearance, torture and murder."

This may be true, and it certainly is true that we are now, for the first time in our history, openly advocating for the right to torture. However our government has a well documented history of covertly supporting and sanctioning murder and torture when it suits it, with a particularly sorry record of supporting brutal regimes in Latin America. Those security forces in Guatemala were trained and equiped at least in part with US tax dollars. In El Salvador, the regime we supported conducted a brutal campaign of torture and death to exterminate the opposition. Same is true in Honduras, where John Negroponte is credibly linked with the abuses. We openly supported an illegal war against a sovereign Nicaragua. The list goes on and on. It is not for nothing that officials have been speaking of the "El Salvador option" to pacify Iraq.

John Edwards writes:

"The information the American people were hearing from the president -- and that I was being given by our intelligence community -- wasn't the whole story. Had I known this at the time, I never would have voted for this war."

Edwards and others should have known this at the time! Many voices tried to make themselves heard. Doubts were raised from many official quarters: the IAEA, Hans Blix and his people, the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (later partially declassified), not to mention record-setting anti-war protests that occured before the war, before his vote even. Much of the international community was dead set against this war. All of this should have raised a red flag in the minds of even minimally curious people. The "we were all fooled" argument just doesn't fly. I will not vote for any politician who voted for this war unless they publicly apologize for this vote, as gross a dereliction of duty as can be imagined.

I think along the same lines as the rest of your article when it comes to placekicking deciding OT. One simple rule would be to decree that only a TD will bring about sudden death in OT. A figgie will count, but the OT will go on.

Now as to this: "...and the rest of a World Cup soccer game after the first goal is scored."

At least in soccer matches are not decided by specialists who trot onto the field for a brief moment, even in the many fine WC matches it has been my pleasure to watch.

Reader Ira is correct in his assessment of Spanish people and their TV. During visits to my family in Valencia, I notice that there is the occasional breast to be seen on TV, and I even saw a commercial for a chocolate bar featuring a young man in his skivvies with an obvious erection. Big deal. The only violence I saw was on American movies shown on Spanish TV, which the Spaniards seem to like. This did not seem to corrupt the people I met, who where almost without fail polite, generous, well adjusted people.

What I did notice about Spanish media was how well they informed their readers and viewers on topics that affect them. The Iraq war was covered in depth and with brutal honesty. National affairs, such as laws to protect women from domestic violence, immigration and job issues, health care etc. received prominent and thorough coverage (check out www.elpais.es for a good example). I sat rapt with attention before the TV one day as Mariano Rajoy, the current opposition leader, sat with a panel of journalists and had a frank, unscripted, in depth discussion of political and social issues facing his party. This was simply amazing to me. Real discourse! This exposed for me the real obsenity of the American media: we will never see such a display of journalism here. The American media, particularly TV, is failing miserably to present to us accurately and honestly the data we need to be good citizens. Instead, we are treated like children. Enough!

Mooch's may have been a good-ol-boy hiring, but at least he was qualified. Matt Millen, on the other had, had not done anything in his previous life to show he was qualified to be a big time NFL GM. My impression at the time was that this was a big time good-ol-boy hiring, and I don't remember anyone squawking about it the same way they do over questionable head coaching hires. The Lions deserve what they got.

The lead-in to the article says:

"But will attacking the Connecticut senator make the party stronger -- or alienate its moderates?"

Isn't this just rich. Since when can the waging for aggressive war, seemingly banned forever by Nuremberg, be considered a "moderate" course of action? Have we all gone mad? It's time to impose some sanity. The Iraq war is a moral and legal crime, and those Democrats who supported it should humbly beg our pardon for the disservice they have done us and resign their positions.

"And is anyone else a little frightened when the president starts referring to the U.S. armed forces as "my military"?"

Yes. This, and the desire to torture people, is the stuff of dictatorship.

One disturbing aspect of US corporations cooperating in this censorship is that should the hard right in the US succeed in implementing censorship here (you know, to keep us "safe" from terrorists, child molesters and such), they will have willing and able cooperation from companies that have already perfected the technology in China.