In your opinion, with no evidence I might add. It has cost thousands of future lives in my opinion. The good will toward the United States was the first causualty, and the end result will be more attacks, not less. Given that other choices were at the governments disposal, to choose and condone a path that is against the moral values of the majority of US citizens is down to calous disregard for what you are supposed to be fighting for. Don't forget, these assholes were picked up in the Afghan desert. What are they going to tell you that will 'save lives'? Sweet FA. Rabid pro-Americanism in the face of clear cut wrong doing is a dispicable trait and not a worthy position given that the American founders had so explicitly warned of the corruption of power. It is traitorous to not to oppose the tyranny of the few, of the government, as they sacrifice the interests of the whole for their narrow ideological goals. IM, you may feel that an attack of GITMO or the President is an insult to America, but that is not the case. The history of the US proves that. Democracy requires it. This is the worst Administration in living memory, and will go down as such regardless of the efforts of a few deniers like yourself. Calling a failed and regressive policy criminal, because it breaks your own laws and contradicts the constitution, is the honest and patriotic thing to do.

Iron Mike, On the contrary I believe it is supported by every word that proceeds out of the President's mouth. Consider how many times he has assurred us that 'The United States does not torture' and weigh that against the revelations in today's Washington Post article on Cheney. http://blog.washingtonpost.com/cheney/chapters/pushing_the_envelope_on_presi/index.html (Part 2 of a series of four) Do I see Bush as the devil? I do not. I believe him to be a fool, but an agressive one - and thereby dangerous. It isn't that he can't understand, it's that he doesn't really try, while presumming that he does. Sadly, too much that can be described as 'evil' has flowed in the wake of this President's incapacities. It isn't foam at the mouth, it is the tears in our eyes.

Bush was and still is being used badly.

iron Mike, You can't get the article? Go to http://washintonpost.com. The story is part of a series 'ANGLER' [Cheney's secret service code name] by Jo Becker and Barton Gellman. Once you click on the story, there will be an inset which allows you to select a 'chapter'. The second 'Pushing the evelope on Presidential Power' , covers the matter of prisoners and detainees. "I do believe President Bush when he asserts the US government does not condone torture." Your faith is touching, but severely misplaced. The evidence that this is so is voluminous and well known [Check out 'The Torture Papers, Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521853248&ss=res], Or Jane Mayer's article in the New Yorker. [http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/02/27/060227fa_fact] Or a more recent one by Seymour Hersh [http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/06/25/070625fa_fact_hersh] To begin with '. . .does not condone?'. Condone NO. Actually torture? Unfortunately YES. Then of course you cannot torture, by definition, if you are the one, the only one, who gets to determine what is torture and what is not. This Presidency has claimed such power for itself. "I fully condone the use of water-boarding . . ." Out of your own mouth! As the references above point out, waterboarding is understood to be an outlawed interrogation technique under intenational agreements to which the United States is party. Not only party to those agreements, but we have incorporated them into American law. This administration has arrogated to itself the right to ignore American law on the President's authority [See the recent 4th US Circut Court of Appeals Decision on the President's authority to declare some one legally on American soil an enemy combatant, with no recourse to any American legal rights. [http://pacer.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinion.pdf/067427.P.pdf] What would our 'good lawer' Fred Thompson do? "Frankly, these methods have been instrumental in saving thousands of lives." The administration has repeatedly asserted this, but documentary evidence is rarely forthcomming. What has been seen is generally more equivocal than convincing. "Just because you and the President have differing opinions and definitions, does not make you right and him a liar." My point about Bush isn't that he doesn't tell us the truth, at least some of the time, but that his intent is to sell us what he wants us to believe. In this instance, I pointed to a matter where what he was telling us was patently untrue, but useful for him to assert. Who knows, he may actually believe his own spin. Believe what you want to believe, but reality is on the other side. That will be the understanding of history. Sadly. Tragically.

The lawfulness of using Torture during interrogation for the purpose of obtaining what the torturer considers vital information, is being debated since times immemorial. Nevertheless, as for Euthanasia, the debate is clouded by some misunderstandings. First of all: What is Torture. According to The nonbinding United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (UNCAT) which came into force (only for signatory nations) in June 1987, Torture is: (Wikipedia) However, we already have a problem: What is severe pain or suffering? Is pulling of the nails bound to produce more suffering than water boarding, where the individual has a horrible feeling of near drowning? It may depend from the individual. For a person scared of dogs, a fake dog attack may be devastating ( or rats, or spiders). Will we be more inclined to use torture if it is perceived to be of a minor type? What about the efficacy and painless quality of mental torture (remember 'The Manchurian Candidate?) Final point: If the favorite type of torture is deemed to be efficacious, and relatively painless (humane torture!), is the State morally justified to use it eg to save lives? I don't think torture will ever be 'legalized?, but its use for raisons d'etat will continue, particularly in our age of Terrorism.

iron Mike, In response to my "As the references above point out, waterboarding is understood to be an outlawed interrogation technique under intenational agreements to which the United States is party. Not only party to those agreements, but we have incorporated them into American law." you wrote: You 'skimmed' all of them.? My My, you must have been very busy. Perhaps if you read them . . . . In the first article I proposed, the Washington Post 'ANGLER' series, the chapter on 'Pushing the Envelope on Presidential Power" and the sub-section titled 'At any time and in any place' you will find the following paragraph: "That same day, Aug. 1, 2002, Yoo signed off on a second secret opinion, the contents of which have never been made public. According to a source with direct knowledge, that opinion approved as lawful a long list of interrogation techniques proposed by the CIA -- including waterboarding, a form of near-drowning that the U.S. government has prosecuted as a war crime since at least 1901. The opinion drew the line against one request: threatening to bury a prisoner alive." And, a bit further up you will find this paragraph: "Geneva rules forbade not only torture but also, in equally categorical terms, the use of "violence," "cruel treatment" or "humiliating and degrading treatment" against a detainee "at any time and in any place whatsoever." The War Crimes Act of 1996 made any grave breach of those restrictions a U.S. felony [Read the act]. The best defense against such a charge, Addington wrote, would combine a broad presidential directive for humane treatment, in general, with an assertion of unrestricted authority to make exceptions." Follow up by reading the succeeding five paragraphs and you will have a pretty clear picture of the game the administration played, and is playing to this day. I chose the particular sources cited because they not only reference the acts committed, but document that a direct line of documentation exists which ties those acts all the way up to the highest levels of the executive branch. Whatever punishments have been meted out, that linkage has never been followed out. It is a well established principle that examinations of misconduct by military personnel must extend to the question of command responsibility. I wonder what the right would say about this (or a Republican Congress do), if a Democratic administration were responsible. In general, the right wing take on Abu Ghraib/torture et al can be summed up as: No big deal, vastly overplayed (And it’s been dealt with!) This characterization is a gross distortion of a very sad and shameful reality. The rest of the world knows it to be true. A vast body of evidence exits, and when Americans are made to face it, we will be (quite properly) appalled. But let's cut to the chase. Governments, Interrogation and Torture All civilized governments will proclaim they don't torture. In reality nearly all assume, under sufficiently pressing circumstances, they and all others will do it. The question is what constitutes sufficiently pressing circumstances. I would propose this. You know, to the extent you can know, that a catastrophic act is about to occur (a matter of hours, not days). You know, to the extent you can know, you have in your custody an individual or individuals who can provide you with the information to avert the disaster. Then you do what you have to do, but don't make it public knowledge. If it becomes public, you own up to what was done, but point to overwhemingly compelling circumstances and are prepared to document those circumstances. You attest that you deeply regret what you had to do, and that you understand this to be a unique event, not one which will determine your future actions. This, I expect, we can all live with. Beyond this nothing.. What must not be done is to make torture a policy, which this administration patently did. Then they extended the policy from the intelligence community out into the general military community, willy-nilly, to people who had no interrogation training at all. Interrogation is a critcal matter for the conflict with radicalism. What experts know is that torture is, at best, a desparate measure. It is not reliable, and hardly optiimal. Intensive interrogation of key figures must be placed in the hands of individuals well trained in the art of obtaining actionable intelligence. Leaving it to utter amateurs, which the American chain of command -in Iraq and in Washington- did, was madness. Oh, and as to what is and is not torture? How about: it's a little like pornography, you'll know it when you see it? The point is that we did things - and explicitly condoned doing them - that had they been done by others to us, we would have no hesitation describing as torture.

IM You wrote: No it wasn't. The proposition was: Any relationship between what President Bush says and the truth is purely coincidental. The only necessary relationship is between what he says, and what he thinks will sell whatever he is trying to sell at that moment. My claim is that Bush is a pitch-man, not a truth teller. What he says may be true, but it's what he is trying to sell that matters: exclusively.

Aggressive coercive interrogation, short of torture is really what's at issue.---though admittedly many here on OD consider them one and the same. If the goal is to achieve a confession, I'd agree with you. If the goal is actionable intelligence, the evidence emphatically proves otherwise. I've already posted links above to the Library Tower plot foiled as the result of waterboarding KSM. What more do you need? IM

What is "convenient" is my ability to evaluate the situation in Darfur and come to the conclusion it is genocide, while simultaneously evaluating the use of waterboarding and agree with the Bush administration that as applied to KSM, it falls short of an ambigous definition of torture. There is no contradiction in the two evaluations and demonstrates my ability to think critically instead of being a slave to ideology. Why you are incapable of understanding that, I'll never know. As for why anyone takes me seriously...that's not really important to me. I come here to debate the issues and broaden my vision. I make quite a good living on my credibility, so I guess it's working. IM

Courtney, I never suggested they were slaves to ideology. I was only referring to my own assessment. What you call “conveniently selective,” I’d call evaluating each issue on its own merits. I reach different conclusions on different topics—so what? That suggests that I am not a slave to ideology. In all fairness, I already threw you a bone on the issue of Darfur and promised to research the differences between the situations in the south and the west of Sudan…though you seem more interested in fighting semantics instead of mass murder. I think a willingness to evaluate additional information speaks to an open mind and makes Chris' comments pretty irrelevant--they surely don't add to either debate. Should I close ranks and defend every point regardless of evidence to ensure I am consistent? Hmm, that sounds pretty much like an ideologue to me and often describes many of the posters here, don’t you think? IM

IM, Once more into the breach: In response to my "As the references above point out, water boarding is understood to be an outlawed interrogation technique under international agreements to which the United States is party. Not only party to those agreements, but we have incorporated them into American law." you wrote: The Jane Meyer New Yorker article cited: Meyer references the aggressive interrogation techniques approved for use at Abu Ghraib, Guantanimo, and elsewhere, which we know extended to water boarding, and her article includes this paragraph: "In exasperation, according to another participant, Mora said that whether the Pentagon enshrined it as official policy or not, the Geneva conventions were already written into both U.S. and international law. Any grave breach of them, at home or abroad, was classified as a war crime. To emphasize his position, he took out a copy of the text of U.S. Code 18.2441, the War Crimes Act, which forbids the violation of Common Article Three, and read from it. The point, Mora told me, was that “it’s a statute. It exists—we’re not free to disregard it. We’re bound by it. It’s been adopted by the Congress. And we’re not the only interpreters of it. Other nations could have U.S. officials arrested.” " Reading has its uses. As to irrelevant. This thread begins with: "Any relationship between what President Bush says and the truth is purely coincidental. The only necessary relationship is between what he says, and what he thinks will sell whatever he is trying to sell at that moment." I offered Bush's repeated statement that 'We don't torture' as an example of saying something demonstrably untrue, which nonetheless was a point he wanted to sell. It is incontestable that under Bush we have done things that, had they been done by others, we would have no hesitation describing as torture. With reference to an FBI eyewitness account of things seen at Guantanimo, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois stated on the floor of the US Senate that they sounded like things we would have expected to be done by Nazis, or done in Stalin's gulags. [Yes, yes I know, right wing media immediately exploded with a furious smokescreen over Durbin comparing us to the Nazis. At no point, of course, did these fulminating gauardians of America's reputation contend these things hadn’t happened. Do you, does anyone, contend these were NOT things we would have expected of the Nazis? After all that was the only point Durbin had actually made.] So let's move on to another selling point item (just coming back into the news). A 1978 US law requires the government to go to a FISA court in order to employ electronic surveillance against US citizens. The law has been amended several times to allow for the ways the environment in which the law has to function has changed, and never more so than in the wake of 9/11. When the President signed these changes into law, he specifically complimented the Congress on giving him what was needed. Yet, at more or less the same time he offered the compliment, Bush had authorized the NSA to eavesdrop without obtaining warrants. During thr 2004 campaign Bush said the following: [For a more fulsome discussion of the administration’s way with the FISA question you can consult Glen Greenwalds salon blog: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/05/21/fisa_changes/index.html] Now the point to consider with respect to the matter leading off this thread is this: Bush need not have said anything. He did not have to offer the compliment to Congress, when he had issued, or was just about to issue, an order allowing wiretaps without a court order. And he did not have to assure an audience at a campaign stop that court orders were always required when he knew he had authorized wiretapping without court orders some two years earlier. He need not have done these things, but he did! Certainly consistent with: "Any relationship between what President Bush says and the truth is purely coincidental. The only necessary relationship is between what he says, and what he thinks will sell whatever he is trying to sell at that moment." Your problems with the Washington Post site are a puzzle. It has to be one of the most accessed web sites of its type in the world. The articles on Cheney this week were highly publicized and frequently commented upon in major media. It strains credulity to find the series would be somehow screened away from general observation.

I really don't think it's being screened away from general population. I think it's a local firewall issue for any site that uses the word "blog" in the URL. The FISA discussion is a fascinationg one. As communications technology has advanced, FISA has become obsolete and in need of updating. I certainly believe the citizenry deserves to be protected from intrusive spying, but the Bush administrations applications are far from the "domestic spying" buzzword perpetuated by major media. IM

iron Mike, The flat out assertion that FISA is obsolete is one of the administrations ploys. There is (and was) a debate, and changes were made, before and after 9/11. That was my point. The question from the perspective of this thread, however, is why the President stated that he was content with what Congress had given him, then issued an executive order obviating the (newly amended) law, and years later stated nothing of the sort had been done. As to FISA, if further changes are needed, pursue them. I have no inherent objection, only that the pursuit should be open, and the rule of law affirmed.