Letters to the Editor
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OT Judge orders White House to hold e-mails
By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer 15 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - A federal judge Monday ordered the White House to preserve copies of all its e-mails, a move that Bush administration lawyers had argued strongly against.
U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy directed the Executive Office of the President to safeguard the material in response to two lawsuits that seek to determine whether the White House has destroyed e-mails in violation of federal law.
In response, the White House said it has been taking steps to preserve copies of all e-mails and will continue to do so. The administration is seeking dismissal of the lawsuits brought by two private groups, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive.
The organizations allege the disappearance of 5 million White House e-mails. The court order issued by Kennedy, an appointee of President Clinton, is directed at maintaining backup tapes which contain copies of White House e-mails.
The Federal Records Act details strict standards prohibiting the destruction of government documents including electronic messages, unless first approved by the archivist of the United States.
Justice Department lawyers had urged the courts to accept a proposed White House declaration promising to preserve all backup tapes.
"The judge decided that wasn't enough," said Anne Weismann, an attorney for CREW, which has gone to court over secrecy issues involving the Bush administration and has pursued ethical issues involving Republicans on Capitol Hill.
http://tinyurl.com/yt6ok9
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The real underlying problem
Che,
I'm with you, and I believe Goldberg is a symptom and a non-entity. But I don't believe you have followed the chain of responsibility for the current atmosphere of "uncertainty" all the way back to its source. Granted, in a particular media company, the owners ultimately set policy; the question is, why would they care whether waterboarding (or any other technique) is or is not "torture"? It only makes sense for them to take an interest in the question if they are being pressured to provide cover for the war criminals in the Administration.
So the ultimate source of the obfuscation is no doubt the same small cadre in the Expletive Branch who have brought us this disgraceful policy to begin with. One motivation they might have is obvious -- to avoid having their (past) crimes recognized as such.
Many others have noted that merely raising the question "is waterboarding torture?" would have been unthinkable only a few short years ago. That there is any confusion on the issue now shows that the current attack is not just on the Constitution, but on the mind.
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Clean Mean Ledeen Doctrine
"Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."
To the best of my knowlege, Goldberg is a Pro wrestler: this explains his business.
Insanity is religious uncleanliness.
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"Expletive branch"; I like that ;-)
Fits 'em to a tee.
I would submit, Peter B, that there is at this point no difference between the Expletive Branch and the CorpoMediaConglomeration; they function as one and the same.
No pressure, in other words, is needed to get them to all agree (and they do) to obscure and elide and step around the facts.
It's their job. And they do it.
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And BTW did I ever mention
that the Goldberg/Beinart "discussion" linked by Our Glenn is an obscenity?
Well, it is.
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Since we're splitting hairs...
OK, I'll play. Since Jonah says that we "need" to go to war with somebody, maybe he means that we NEED to go to war. That still doesn't contradict his original assertion that "pro-war" people don't LIKE to go to war. If they didn't feel it necessary, they wouldn't do it.
www.nelsonguirado.com
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"Expletive Branch"
...deserves to be trademarked.
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@Ché Pasa
Thanks for the link.
In point of fact, medically it is not drowning until death occurs. If a situation like the one Nance describes occurred naturally (loss of consciousness, water in lungs, etc.) and the patient survived, it would be referred to as a near-drowning. I know from experience (no it didn't happen to me) that this is the case even as the patient lies in a coma and slips toward death because the apoxyia lasted too long for the brain to remain undamaged. It was still called a near-drowning until the moment the patient was pronounced dead. It is also a fact that it is never referred to as mock or simulated drowning in such circumstances, either.
From the point of view of the victim of waterboarding, it is repeated murder by drowning. The victim becomes unconscious repeatedly, there is nothing that would distinguish this from the experience of dying except finding oneself conscious again.
I support Nance's name of drowning torture. The fact that the "drowning" part may not be accurate medically would seem to be overridden by the fact that the medical community doesn't have special medical terminology hanging around to describe the various facets of torture. Not that it should. If people quibble, near-drowning torture is for "drowning is dying" quibblers. Torture is an appropriate word under the U.S. declarations, reservations, and understandings to CATCIDT, because PTSD, panic attacks and depression are defined in the DSM, and therefore can be considered long term psychological harm, and are among the effects of waterboarding.
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Mr Humidity: what?
If someone supports the war, then they should have to enlist? Is that your position? Seriously?
Well that's brilliant. Do you support having your garbage picked up? Then why aren't you a garbage man? Ever looked at some video porn? Bet it never even occurred to you to spend a summer as an apprentice fluffer, you selfish bastard. Do you eat red meat? You slaughter the cow yourself then, I hope. And I could go on and on, but someone such as yourself who made the argument you made would never get it. Ever.
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Torture is a corrupt ideology
and a corrupting one, too.
But here is what I find extremely stupid about the whole conversation.
First, we have people who still stupidly mouth the whole "ticking time bomb" scenario as a justification for the idea of torture. Peel yourself away from the TV, folks. That kind of shit only happens in Hollywood.
The whole argument seems to me to be self-negating. It goes like this: We pre-emptively torture to avoid the ticking time bomb scenario that we use to justify the whole idea of torture in the first place.
So here is my proposal; get all the TV and movie ideas out of your heads, and come to grips with the fact that torture is a binary thing, it either is or it isn't. There aren't degrees of it, and it is never justified.
Don't let morally corrupt people like Jonah Goldberg try to justify it, or change the meaning of the language used in the "discussion". Don't let them even intimate that there is nuance to the issue. Keep shining the light; eventually these cockroaches will have nowhere left to hide.