This be the verse

Torture still wins.

I wonder if the Dems will go about the country, "spreading it far and wide", that they intend to go easier on detained terrorists? I wonder if that will help them?

The movie is "The Lives of Others". My bad.

I hate it when things go from bad to verse.

That said, Pauli does have a point. Thus far the president hasn't lied under oath about torture, for the simple reason that he hasn't been asked under oath about it. Yet.

Erin: If he’s ever asked if he authorized “torture”, Bush can in good conscience respond “no” if he doesn’t believe water-boarding is torture. This is a problem of defining torture.

Congress rejected a Kennedy Amendment to the Detainee bill last year that would have defined water-boarding as torture.

But please, don’t let that stop anyone here from impeaching Bush!

Believing that all these people are guilty and torturing them is something Russia, East Germany, China, etc. do.

In many cases, that's actually overstated.

We may frown on imprisoning dissents, but we have to admit, they usually actually are dissents, and that actually is a crime in those countries, with actual due process that results in an actual guilty verdict. It's the law is the problem, not the application of the law.

While it sounds paradoxical, in general, in a police state that actually admits it is one, you tend to have more rights than in a police state that does not. In an admitted one, while the executive has infinite power, they don't want any random person in the executive to have that power.

Sure, they start out that way, where people turn each others in and any police officers is a law unto themselves, but that quickly leads to chaos and personal fiefdoms, and, more importantly, threats to power.

To avoid that, they actually set out 'totalitarian rules' that ensures that, while the people at the top can do anything, people under them actually have to follow rules with what they can and cannot do. (One of these rules being 'whatever the top leadership says, goes.')

Likewise, we frown on torturing people, but those places actually have written rules about what they can do (Even if it's well past what we think is acceptable) and usually do follow those rules, with real oversight. They keep (And do not randomly destroy) records of these interrogations. They have rules about life-threatening methods, they have rules about which people can be tortured, etc.

In other words, all their torture is official, and, being official, is actually regulated by a bureaucracy. A bureaucracy that does not really want prisoners to die, one that doesn't want crazy people torturing for fun, etc. They want information by any means, and want to deter threats, so torture, but they usually don't want sadism or deaths.

We, OTOH, have decided to turn into a police state without admitting it, so we have absolutely no legal protections. A CIA officer could kidnap, for example, their ex-husband who is an American citizen, spirit them into Gitmo, and they'd never be able to get out because there's no damn oversight at all. Rules without oversight are not rules.

In China, think of them what you will, that can't happen. They have much looser rules, but have actual oversight of those rules. (Not out of the kindness of their heart, but because it makes them look 'legitimate', and helps keep down subordinates becoming too powerful.)

Does torture beat committing perjury to further deny the civil rights of women you've previously abused?

I think that the destroyed tapes show the prisoners being forced to wear cheerleader's outfits while forming a human pyramid with poodles dancing in front of them.

Scott in PA
Congress rejected a Kennedy Amendment to the Detainee bill last year that would have defined water-boarding as torture.

Our courts already decided that water-boarding was torture. Repeatedly, every time the question has come up. Military and civilian criminal courts, and even a civil court.

But, hey, that's not all. The English government in 1623 asserted that fabricated confessions were tortured out of Englishmen by the Dutch during the Amboyna massacre. By waterboarding. (And, as we're all aware, the US inherited English case law, including what the meaning of 'torture' is.)

United States v. Sawada defined waterboarding as both torture and a war crime.

Mr. Dreher--
I would be cautious in accepting the mainstream media's claims about the Bush administration's alleged "torture." We all know they're as clear and reliable as dishwater. Unless, of course, you have some other evidence, in which case I advise you to post it. I'm interested in the whole situation.

Lefties are a lot more willing to recognize that there are other sovereign nations on the planet.

And before anyone takes that the wrong way and tries to read into that that the US should be 'forced' to do anything, no one's trying to assert that the US is not sovereign.

That doesn't, however, mean it should run around breaking treaty obligations. In the modern world, countries are very reliant on each other, and the only reason the US can get away with the crap it pulls is because it happens to have a lot of power right now.

Ignoring treaties is a sign of inherent dishonesty. At the very least, we should at least withdraw from them if we disagree with them. (Even if they don't have a withdrawal mechanism, we can still claim to withdraw from them.) The thing is, of course, that 'we' don't disagree with them, if by 'we' poeple mean 'the American people'. The people who do disagree with them are various parts of the business community who do not want to wield overt power.

Which, incidentally, is why our political system is entirely broken. At least half the stuff the right does, and probably a third the stuff the left does, are for someone other than 'us'. (I bet other people here have different ideas of the percentages, but I'm not here to debate that.)

Which is bad enough, but obviously they can't do it out in the open, so we end up doing insane stuff like ignoring treaties instead of leaving them, and not enforcing laws instead of repealing them, etc, etc.