Keep in mind that the prison population soared during the incumbency of Bill "I didn't inhale" Clinton.-- Aycharaych

OT and I don't mean to take away from the important discussion but criticisms of Clinton for the trivial "I didn't inhale" comment are a real pet peeve of mine. I have little love for the best Republican President since Lincoln. But people who use that line in an attempt to denigrate him are just morons.

Did he say it? Yes. Did it sound stupid? Yes. Was he being honest about attempting to get high? Yes.

It seems to me that only assholes and those that like to pick nits harp on that statement. Here is a guy who was honest enough to admit he had tried it and yet that wasn't good enough. It is really irritating. We now have a man at the helm that was both an alcoholic and a coke fiend. An AWOL, faux cowboy whose very life is the definition of hypocrisy. A man who can barely string a sentence together and can't go a single day without saying something incredibly stupid and yet we still have morons quoting "I didn't inhale." People say they want honesty -- that they respect it -- but that isn't really true for some people. Some only want honesty so they can figure out a way to oh so self-righteously use it as a bludgeon.

When asked about it in an interview with Dan Rather...

“You bet. Even though it was absolutely true. I tried it, and I really tried to inhale. I was incapable of inhaling,” says Mr. Clinton, laughing.

“That's really what I was trying to say. And it was just one of those dumb things you say, and then you have to live with for years and years afterward.”

If you want to fix illegal immigration for example, fix this country so that 20 million people weren't effectively unemployable because of some bullshit 2 joint pot bust. Where I live the litany of crimes that are now felonious is obscene. Yell an insult in public to more than one person and that's "terrorism" or "making a terroristic threat". Get frisked by a cop for no reason and they find a bag a weed and that's 'Intent to distribute' [...] Soon no one will be able to fill out an employment form, get an apartment lease, a car loan or be on the grid employed above minimum wage. -- (~~~~)

The police state mentality that has gripped the nation over drugs for ~40 years now has contributed to our current insanely blasé acceptance of state torture. It's been casually asserted here in letters before, and I know I'm not doing anything more than "asserting" again -- but a people who are desensitized to their own mistreatment by The Authorities are more likely to accept degrading treatment of out-of-sight, nameless, brown Others.

Having said that, why the hell would some folks read a blog post devoted to a presidential candidate's love of torture, and then write letters about the (largely state controlled) U.S. prison system? The worst prison system abuses occur within the state systems, with the possible exception of federal supermax pens like Terre Haute. Moreover, the "liberal" arm of the MSM has been covering this issue lately -- in Koppel's miniseries on San Quentin. You could have knocked me over with a feather when I stumbled over that while channel surfing ~3 weeks ago.

So....your point is?

The SERE program was designed strictly for defense against torture regimes, but the C.I.A.’s new team used its expertise to help interrogators inflict abuse. “They were very arrogant, and pro-torture,” a European official knowledgeable about the program said. “They sought to render the detainees vulnerable—to break down all of their senses. It takes a psychologist trained in this to understand these rupturing experiences.”

[...]

The program tied together many strands of the agency’s secret history of Cold War-era experiments in behavioral science. (In June, the C.I.A. declassified long-held secret documents known as the Family Jewels, which shed light on C.I.A. drug experiments on rats and monkeys, and on the infamous case of Frank R. Olson, an agency employee who leaped to his death from a hotel window in 1953, nine days after he was unwittingly drugged with LSD.) The C.I.A.’s most useful research focussed on the surprisingly powerful effects of psychological manipulations, such as extreme sensory deprivation. According to Alfred McCoy, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, who has written a history of the C.I.A.’s experiments in coercing subjects, the agency learned that “if subjects are confined without light, odors, sound, or any fixed references of time and place, very deep breakdowns can be provoked.”

Agency scientists found that in just a few hours some subjects suspended in water tanks—or confined in isolated rooms wearing blacked-out goggles and earmuffs—regressed to semi-psychotic states. Moreover, McCoy said, detainees become so desperate for human interaction that “they bond with the interrogator like a father, or like a drowning man having a lifesaver thrown at him. If you deprive people of all their senses, they’ll turn to you like their daddy.” McCoy added that “after the Cold War we put away those tools. There was bipartisan reform. We backed away from those dark days. Then, under the pressure of the war on terror, they didn’t just bring back the old psychological techniques—they perfected them.”

The C.I.A.’s interrogation program is remarkable for its mechanistic aura. “It’s one of the most sophisticated, refined programs of torture ever,” an outside expert familiar with the protocol said. “At every stage, there was a rigid attention to detail. Procedure was adhered to almost to the letter. There was top-down quality control, and such a set routine that you get to the point where you know what each detainee is going to say, because you’ve heard it before. It was almost automated. People were utterly dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process. It is just chilling.”

Jane Mayer, "The Black Sites"

I'm sorry if I don't think water boarding is the worst that's being done. Perhaps Mr. Giuliani would like to address whether reducing a person to a semi-psychotic state and producing deep breakdowns qualifies as "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession."

You're right Mr. Giuliani, it does matter who does it, it is worse "when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity."

Those are the definitions, Mr. Giuliani, in a document that the U.S. was so sure was a description of unconstitutional behavior, it declared it wouldn't need to enact implementing legislation.

One other thing, Sir.

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.

Any country that would even think of electing your sorry ass is flirting with jail bait.