“Three Republican senators—John W. Warner of Virginia, chairman of the Armed Services Committee; Lindsey O. Graham of South Carolina; and Mr. McCain—are bravely promoting an alternative measure that would allow terrorists to be questioned and tried without breaking faith with traditional U.S. values.”

My understanding is that the alternative bill proposed breaks with traditional U.S. values as completely as the Bush version. It still allows for trial without defense access to evidence deemed to be secret. It allows for the abolition of habeus corpus protections for defendents. It doesn’t allow for the detainess to seek protection from the federal judiciary. Unless I’m misinterpreting the new measure, it looks just like the Bush bill, sans waterboarding.

Oh, breathing is just extremely difficult and here am I thinking there was something bad happening but hey, if I can just about breathe everything must be fine. Jet evidences the single most seductive and yet utterly naive thought about all of this: that these things must only be happening to bad people who really deserve it. Breathes in, breathes out, without difficulty.

this guy is really curious about the methods, fixated on the methods? He’s a sick bastard, psychopath, isn’t he?

I don’t know about that. As someone who wages aggressive war (or ‘pre-emptive war’ or whatever you young people call it these days) he is, under the Nuremburg precedents, an alleged Class A war criminal.

I have to say ‘alleged’ because of the principle that he is innocent until he’s had a fair trial, a chance to clear his name, and is hung from the neck until dead.

Which I would regret. As the poet John Donne reminds us, “Any mans death diminishes me,” even an alleged Class A war criminal.

Yeah, this is another aspect of this I don’t quite understand:

Bush “was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?”

I mean, c’mon, ever since the phrase “will no one rid me of this freaken priest?” was uttered, the human civilization has known how to deal with these problems. You call your top spook and you say: “do what you need to do to get the information”. And, I mean, unless you’re a some kind of a really sick fuck, you don’t want to know about the ‘methods’, right? I can’t imagine Stalin, for example, asking Beria about the methods.

And this guy, this “high-view” manager who says things like: “generals will decide the troops level”, this guy is really curious about the methods, fixated on the methods? He’s a sick bastard, psychopath, isn’t he?

(Rush to the middle: 14 seconds divided by 2 = 7 seconds. Hey, we’ve got a winner!)

Should these prisoners ever be put on trial in public we will be able to judge their condition for ourselves. Many doubt that this will be permitted, presuming that their maltreatment has turned them into vegetables. The president’s proposed rules for trial could keep the defendants out of view, which would do nothing to refute such suspicions.

14 seconds of fear seems incredibly mild when compared to normal life in a US high school, let alone a torture room.

Or perhaps I’m missing something? Water boarding is putting someone on a board, leaning it so their head is slightly below their lungs (to minimize the chance of water being inhaled), putting plastic or cloth over their face , and then pouring water over it until they break ? And during this process they can still breath, but it is just extremely difficult? I could be wrong, but then again, I’m just getting my info from Human Rights Watch, the notorious pro-torture movement.

If this was shown on capital hill, I’d find it hard to believe anyone would call it torture as it isn’t even in the same ball park as to how torture is depicted in your latest block buster thriller. I mean this is pathetic, Human Rights Watch says the longest anyone has been waterboarded is 2 minutes. 2 minutes of non-permanent fear? If only that was all US soldiers faced when captured.