I also wish that the President who delivers truly inspirational speeches about not forgetting the past would start applying that worthy policy at home.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8086689.stm

"But Mr Mudd withdrew after some senators questioned if he had direct knowledge of techniques such as water-boarding - banned by President Obama.

Some say harsh interrogation techniques practised by the CIA in the past - such as water-boarding, or simulated drowning - amount to torture."

Some say??????

There's a lot in that article one can find objectionable, not the least of which is the Obama Administration's search for the easiest way to kill people. Why don't we just put the detainees in pet carriers, ship them to a distant battlefield, open the doors and, when they run, let soldiers take potshots at them? Problem solved.

Americans are exceptionally good at coming up with euphemisms. Partly, I think, its because Americans are exceptionally gullible at believing euphemisms. We were born in speechifying and documentation, and we'll die by speechifying and documentation.

This is another reasons why news from the gutter keeps becoming important in American life. We can have all the official news organs, government agencies and Fox "News" telling lies and spinning wildly, but Poor Richard's Almanac/underground newspapers/blogs keep percolating up. When our institutions fail, we have a fallback position. You can't fool all the people all the time.

But I digress.

The NYT and other conservative media outlets are currently suffering from "intense justification syndrome", sometimes called "a double standard" and at other times called "lying".

I for one am not opposed to "intense interrogation" but find the idea of torturing another human being repulsive to the nth degree. In my mind there is absolutely nothing as horrid as torture. Even if it produced "results" I would be against it.

I agree with Glenn that I have always wondered what the Vietnamese did to McCain that was universally acclaimed as torture by the MSM. For example, detainees under "intense interrogation" were subjected to deafening music, cold temperatures, walling, stress positions, sleep deprivation, etc. But I've never read that McCain was ever subjected to any of these torturing processes. What was done to him is at best vague, from what I read.

The Bushies are never going to be prosecuted for war crimes and I've concluded that they won't even be investigated. It is the way of life that I've come to accept. They rich elite establishment do not commit crimes. Only the poor go to prison!

Why would any detainee plead guilty? UNLESS OF COURSE he was being beaten with a rubber hose or water-boarded to help him make up his mind?

This sounds like some scheme hatched from the mind of sick fuck Dick Cheney . . . NOT from the Obaminator.

stop right there. torture > confession > execution ? isn't there something written down about 'no person may be deprived of life or liberty without due process'?

i went to bed in america, but i woke up in a soviet gulag, is that what you're telling me?

or is it the case that, as long as we keep them in gitmo, the constitution doesn't control our options? i'd like a second opinion, please. maybe justice scalia.

in their scrubbing of torture as "enhanced-intense-pick your equivocating descriptor-interrogation techniques", as is amply documented at the snarky NPR Check blog on a weekly basis.

Pledge drive time.

What head-spinning games they play. They deny reality and the obvious, then justify it as adherence to a superior moral creed.

we're gonna get healthcare. or something. aren't we?

Who can resist?

"Serious Ask!"

Who wouldn't tell?

"Friendly Advice!"

Doesn't that sound nice?

"is believed to have come from confessions they gave during friendly advice sessions at secret C.I.A. prisons. "

In the second graf of that story is this:

The provision could permit military prosecutors to avoid airing the details of brutal interrogation techniques.

Is this a change from when you first posted?

In any case, the squeamishness evident here is not only despicable but inexplicable. Some of these reporters are brave enough to put themselves in danger in war-torn countries, but they can't bring themselves to write the word "torture"?

I have to wonder if editors are changing the reporters' words, deleting "torture" and inserting "intense interrogation techniques" or any of its variations.

But what scares me most about your post is the possibility of a death penalty for a guilty plea under such circumstances - years of imprisonment, torture, deprivation of basic human rights, all without any kind of legal justification. Besides the obvious perversion of justice and the violation of everything America is supposed to stand for, there's the likelihood that these men, some of them possibly murderers but now broken to the point of madness, will plead guilty not only as a means to martyrdom but simply to end their lives of horror, despair and pain.

If Obama allows this to happen, anything he promises, any of the eloquence he delivers in his speeches, all of it will taste like ashes. This proposal is beyond hypocrisy; it is vicious, murderous hypocrisy.

And despite everything we've seen from Bush, and the growing mound of broken promises from Obama, I will still have a hard time believing that we will execute these men under this policy that is straight out of Orwell by way of Kafka. After all, that's the nature of the morality tales these two prescient authors told: nightmarish incredulity.

This is why I, for one, am so relieved and proud to have a New President who happens to be an intellectual – able to think up solutions to the vexing problems he inherited that are effective, legal, efficient, and, well, just plain smart.

These foreigners are after all dangerous individuals suspected of sympathizing with organizations that plan violent reactions to the interests and actions that the U.S. must implement throughout the world ! Who will benefit from exposing the collateral details of their detainment, of various facts and sensitive materials that could come up during trials, of the sometimes unpleasant techniques necessary to extract confessions? Why put America through that distress?

By simply dispatching these suspected enemies, we would be looking forward, not backward. I say this is simply more smart policy from a smart President, a Christian man who is strong in his faith.

For analysis of this particular issue please link at sig or here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TDgkOOlbwg