Did you mean a whole 30 seconds? Wow, if I'd known that I'd be outraged.! I assumed it was closer to 28 seconds. Waterboarding is the only form of "torture" I've seen reporters actually volunteer for. You figure it out; or get help....... @ Filthy Harry..."What does 9/11 have to do with it? You've absolutely no way of knowing that the people we've tortured have anything to do with 9/11."................No, and neither do you. But asking nicely isn't always an option, in an ongoing unfolding event, where time is a consideration.

You say it much better and more cogently than me. To me, it's elite groups covering for elite groups, whether democrats or republicans. I don't get why there's been a hands-off policy of questioning Bush/Cheney the last 9 years, nor Pelosi's remark that they wouldn't impeach Bush.

But you're right, that if the Obama administration does not investigate these abuses they own them. Maybe explaining it to them this way will make them do the right thing for the country. I don't see how investigating these clear abuses of government and laws of humanity is harming some legislative agenda. The partisanship is always there, particularly when it comes to republicans.

Event Horizon,

Reading comprehension wasn't your strong suit, was it? "30 seconds" implies an attempt to hold your breath. They'll keep the rag tightly wrapped around your face for ten minutes if they like while you're contorting in restraints.

And to a person, they concede in the end that it's torture. Here's Christopher Hitchens before and after:

www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/08/hitchens200808

Surely, the pseudo-Democratic Congress has been guilty of complicitly assisting an emboldened neocon coverup of the kind the Politburo would be blushing with envy to emulate.

Yes, Pelosi was right, but what were the Democrats doing the last four years if not aiding and abetting the very forces their catharctic election dictated they punish. Eric Holder's atrophied spine is symptomatic of the Obama Administration's pandemically insipid political timidity which, if not given the antidote of strong retribution via quick official investigative action, will bury such administration in its own deceptive irrelevancy.

"Now is the time for Reflection, not retribution" cynically uttered President Obama, without even a glimpse of conscious irony, in response to being asked to take action against this abuse of power and covert undermining of the constitution he swore twice to protect!

This from a man who has escalated a Nixonian Cambodian catastrophe boasting over 3 million refugees at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border over the last few weeks and hundreds children and civilians crippled by drones--by getting Congress to quickly pass his supplemental $106B and lethal $665B military budget! Viewed in this context, why should Barack be worried about taking action (against his own barbarously lethal CIA Afghani operatives) that might reflect adversely on his own administration some day soon? After all, he's only protecting Himself...

Joan Walsh's prophetic advise to the timidly partisan Obamyopic minions is right on target:

"Let's not be Sheeple!"

Beyond the impotent cries for justice---as if there is justice that could somehow equal the horror of torture--there is closure.

Mentioned on Micheal Rodgers blog on Open Salon in the context of another gruesome story; closure is what Holder's investigation of Cheney era torture crimes will bring.

As the President has now showed what leadership means by looking forward--he has also showed what management means by (for the most part) putting the right people on the bus to manage their areas. It's Holder's job, not Obama's, to lead the investigation. Obama is not some magical Daddy in charge of everything from my checkbook balance to eridicating evil. He's a leader. He put Holder in charge to investigate crime. Our torture policy is a crime. It is Holder's JOB to do this.

Not the President. Attn Gen Holder. And from the investigation can finally come closure.

If he doesn't, his picture in the history books will be right there next to Alberto Gonzalez and no one will know the difference between the two of them.

And the President's choice will have been the wrong one.

Last May, I wrote a column outlining two exceptions to the no-torture rule: the ticking time bomb scenario and its less extreme variant in which a high-value terrorist refuses to divulge crucial information that could save innocent lives. The column elicited protest and opposition that were, shall we say, spirited.

And occasionally stupid. Dan Froomkin, writing for washingtonpost.com and echoing a common meme among my critics, asserted that "the ticking time bomb scenario only exists in two places: On TV and in the dark fantasies of power-crazed and morally deficient authoritarians." (He later helpfully suggested that my moral deficiencies derived from "watching TV and fantasizing about being Jack Bauer.")

On Oct. 9, 1994, Israeli Cpl. Nachshon Waxman was kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists. The Israelis captured the driver of the car. He was interrogated with methods so brutal that they violated Israel's existing 1987 interrogation guidelines, which themselves were revoked in 1999 by the Israeli Supreme Court as unconscionably harsh. The Israeli prime minister who ordered this enhanced interrogation (as we now say) explained without apology: "If we'd been so careful to follow the [1987] Landau Commission [guidelines], we would never have found out where Waxman was being held."

Who was that prime minister? Yitzhak Rabin, Nobel Peace laureate. The fact that Waxman died in the rescue raid compounds the tragedy but changes nothing of Rabin's moral calculus.

That moral calculus is important. Even John McCain says that in ticking time bomb scenarios you "do what you have to do." The no-torture principle is not inviolable. One therefore has to think about what kind of transgressive interrogation might be permissible in the less pristine circumstance of the high-value terrorist who knows about less imminent attacks. (By the way, I've never seen five seconds of "24.")

My column also pointed out the contemptible hypocrisy of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is feigning outrage now about techniques that she knew about and did nothing to stop at the time.

My critics say: So what if Pelosi is a hypocrite? Her behavior doesn't change the truth about torture.

But it does. The fact that Pelosi (and her intelligence aide) and then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss and dozens of other members of Congress knew about the enhanced interrogation and said nothing, and did nothing to cut off the funding, tells us something very important.

Our jurisprudence has the "reasonable man" standard. A jury is asked to consider what a reasonable person would do under certain urgent circumstances.

On the morality of waterboarding and other "torture," Pelosi and other senior and expert members of Congress represented their colleagues, and indeed the entire American people, in rendering the reasonable person verdict. What did they do? They gave tacit approval. In fact, according to Goss, they offered encouragement. Given the circumstances, they clearly deemed the interrogations warranted.

Moreover, the circle of approval was wider than that. As Slate's Jacob Weisberg points out, those favoring harsh interrogation at the time included Alan Dershowitz, Mark Bowden and Newsweek's Jonathan Alter. In November 2001, Alter suggested we consider "transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies" (i.e., those that torture). And, as Weisberg notes, these were just the liberals.

So what happened? The reason Pelosi raised no objection to waterboarding at the time, the reason the American people (who by 2004 knew what was going on) strongly reelected the man who ordered these interrogations, is not because she and the rest of the American people suffered a years-long moral psychosis from which they have just now awoken. It is because at that time they were aware of the existing conditions -- our blindness to al-Qaeda's plans, the urgency of the threat, the magnitude of the suffering that might be caused by a second 9/11, the likelihood that the interrogation would extract intelligence that President Obama's own director of national intelligence now tells us was indeed "high-value information" -- and concluded that on balance it was a reasonable response to a terrible threat.

And they were right.

You can believe that Pelosi and the American public underwent a radical transformation from moral normality to complicity with war criminality back to normality. Or you can believe that their personalities and moral compasses have remained steady throughout the years, but changes in circumstances (threat, knowledge, imminence) alter the moral calculus attached to any interrogation technique.

You don't need a psychiatrist to tell you which of these theories is utterly fantastical.