That shortly after it was mentioned that shooter's MO was to point at the Democrats handing over the match, his next post was to correct the record by pointing out that it was in fact two matches......

this mornings WSJ opinion piece outlines the opportunities passed to specifically declare waterboarding illegal.

Shooter, you dishonest jackass. Don’t bother trotting out your inane arguments about a Democratic failure to pass legislation. The Kennedy amendment to the Military Commissions Act 2006 failed because 52 of 55 Republicans voted against it while 42 of 43 Democrats voted for it. I won't bother bringing to your attention the Republican obstruction throughout 2007. You and the WSJ can really just shove the dishonesty.

will vote NO on Mukasey...

Mukasey's nomination and the sudden epidemic of conscience over waterboarding in the Senate arises from the Democrats' failure to find any other venue for effective opposition to President Bush.

They have failed in their attacks on the war in Iraq, on the war on S-CHIP, and the trashing of civil liberties.

So now they are playing out their role in advise-and-consent, since it comes with no political consequences.

It would be nice if the Democrats could grow a spine, now that they've sprouted a conscience.

Interaction w/ Sharter24% = self-pwnage

simply get Congress to pass a resolution or a definition by the Speaker of the House of what the definition of "torture" is-rather than continue on letting Cheney play word-guessing-games about HIS defintion.

It is after all,Congress' responsibility to lay down the code of conduct for the military-WH is just COM in Chief-that doesn't give him authority to overstep what authorities Congress has.

Other than the simple pyscho-sexual motives you mention, it is hard to identify who the target population. Who is the administration trying to terrorize into submission?

Us, obviously.

All non-authoritarians who harbor the slightest doubt about the divine right of Emperor Smirky.

All Democrats, all liberals, all minorities, all non-fundie Xians, all non-heterosexuals, all unmarrieds, all child-frees, all members of the reality-based community.

Anyone with an independent thought in her head.

All of us.

And it's working perfectly, too, on its first target: Congress.

shooter242:

re: It's a great technique if you don't care about anything except scoring a cheap point that you don't even score.

But since you brought it up, this mornings WSJ opinion piece outlines the opportunities passed to specifically declare waterboarding illegal. All have failed.

If Democrats want to strip the CIA of this tool, then they ought to legislate it openly, not make law under the table through the confirmation process. Congress has twice had the chance to ban or criminalize waterboarding, but it declined to do so in both the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006. And not for lack of trying: In debating the Military Commissions Act, Ted Kennedy offered a detailed amendment that specifically prohibited waterboarding, as well as other coercive interrogation methods; it lost on the Senate floor, 46-53. http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110010815

- - shooter242 10:36 AM

Loonies at the WSJ and elsewhere are dishonestly focusing on Kennedy's amendment while ignoring other relevant amendments, ignoring the Hamdan decision, ignoring the Geneva treaties, ignoring the Constitution, etc., etc.)

Scott Horton:

http://balkin.blogspot.com/2006/10/when-lawyers-are-war-criminals.html

The initial draft makes clear that the White House sought impunity for crimes arising as a result of the use of three techniques that the Bush Administration (and, from the remarkable wording of one of Bush's press conferences, Bush himself) authorized and which constitute grave breaches under Common Article 3: waterboarding, long-time standing (or as it was called by its NKVD inventors, in Russian: stoika) and hypothermia or cold cell. The use of these techniques is a criminal act. The purported authorization of these techniques is a criminal act. The larger effort to employ them constitutes a joint criminal enterprise.

The [Miltary Commissions] Act [of 2006] does not alter the fact that these practices are outlawed by Common Article 3. However, by creating a series of specifically chargeable crimes that weave and bob through the historical offenses, the drafters apparently seek to make it more difficult to prosecute these offenses in US courts.

At the core, we have this question: are waterboarding, hypothermia and long-time standing "cruel treatment" as the crime is identified in the Act? And on this point, the legislation's sponsors – Senators Warner, McCain and Graham, say "yes," while the White House says "no." A fair reading would say that the Act creates ambiguity where none previously existed. However, a close comparison of the White House's original proposal with the compromise version that resulted clearly undermines the White House's claims, for the changes seem clearly keyed to forbidding the questioned tactics.

Scott Horton, Sunday, October 08, 2006

[...] The ONLY reason to use torture is psycho-sexual. You are a friggin sick pervert and/or a sociopath to choose torture, plain and simple.
- - tempus 11:10 AM

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/02/AR2007110201170_pf.html

This one includes rebuttals about the long term effects clause, it causes them: According to those who have studied waterboarding's effects, it can cause severe psychological trauma, such as panic attacks, for years.

For those unfamiliar with psychological panic attacks or with involuntary panic attacks, they are a sudden dumping of fight-flight hormones into your system, and usually include the perception that you're dying. They aren't just an unreasoning fear, they aren't easily ignored, most of all they aren't something that should be belittled or ignored as a long term effect of an "enhanced interrogation procedure".

I'm sure Sally Satel feels otherwise.

I watched the CIA director interviewed by Charlie Rose in a 2 part interview last week and I don't recall him stating unequivocally even once that the CIA doesn't waterboard anymore. However, even if he did, it would mean nothing because we have no idea, although w can guess what goes on in the CIA "black sites".It doesn't seem that any detainee who was ever shipped to one of the black sites has survived to tell. It's fairly clear that what goes on in those sites would give an old Gestapo hand a massive hard-on.

If Mukasey had told the Senate judiciary committee that he was uncertain if raping a child qualified as pedophilia, his nomination would be dead, but when he says that he's uncertain whether a sadistic war crime act is illegal, this outragous comment is met with extremely mild "reservations".