Re the decapitator: He was angry over the waiting lines that result from Canada's socialized medicine.

Geez, if Cheney is so upset that people might "all get lawyers," then he sure picked the wrong country to be vice president of. This is America; everyone has a lawyer and suing people is what we do. The beauty of this phenomenon is precisely that it's supposed to act as a deterrent against screwing people over. You're supposed to have the, "Aw, hell, they'll all get lawyers" thought _before_ you do something illegal, and therefore not do the illegal thing. Not after, and use it as an excuse to do other illegal things.

Ultimately, keeping an innocent person in prison for fear that he might talk about the illegal things you've done to him is not much different than killing the man you've just robbed so that he can't testify against you.

Looks like grounds for War Crimes indictments for all involved.  After all, the U.S. indicted and found that water-boarding was a war crime after WWII.

But we knew the thinking when they released the Aussie guy on condition of confidentiality.  But let us not carried away with this: this is not worse than the torture itself, especially after they found out, as any policeman would have told them, that torture does not really work, and it certainly does not work six years after you have put someone in jail incommunicado with the outside world.  Torture, in Gitmo as in Abu Ghraib as in everywhere it is practiced, ends up being its own end, with the side advantage of breaking the will of the prisoners.

Certainly talk of war crimes or crimes against humanity is premature at this point - that is, until after November.  What I worry about is the whirring of industial shredders in the Naval Obervatory between now and then.

"Or maybe like a Bond villain if Hannah Arendt were writing the screenplay... "

Ha!

So, why is this man not in jail again?

"executive privilege"?

From a blog, http://venukm.blogspot.com :

Perhaps most disturbing in a collection of unnerving books was the ... book, The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman, which is about what would happen if the human species were suddenly extinguished. I

More disturbing to me is the thought of a less than sudden extinction.

Yawn.  At least he's not Paris or Brittany.  I mean come on.  There is clear causal connection between torturing innocent people and the dearth of attacks on this country.  Therefore, if Clinton had tortured, 9/11 would never have happened.

The biggest issue in this election is not high gas prices, mortgage foreclosures, losing in Afghanistan so we don't lose in Iraq, it's an unchecked expansion of presidential power and the self emasculation of congress.

The meaner he is, the more toe-the-line Bushies revel in it in that they transfer their own meanness onto a Cheney -- who, I like to remind, couldn't even win his own Wyoming county in the '04 election -- who's as amoral as they come.

I've been posting forever that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld are war criminals, usually dismissed in one way or another by the readership.  But they are.  Authentic war criminals who would be convicted if they could ever be tried.

Oddly, I am visiting DC and had dinner last night with a friend from Paris who works for the DOJ and is very knowledgeable about international criminal justice.  In response to my questions, he said that it is technically possible for the International Criminal Court to prosecute these three, or such as John Yoo and David Addington, in that in such cases there is both universal jurisdiction (claimed by the court but not recognized by the US) and, necessarily, no sort of sovereign or diplomatic or or head-of-state immunity.  However, he also said that the court is as yet a weak institution because it does not have the recognition and support of the United States and that as a matter of institutional self-protection the ICC is therefore extremely unlikely to pursue any high US officials.

Pity.  But then, you never know.  There were Nazis prosecuted long after the fact.  As more information emerges with time, we may yet find Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, and I hope Yoo and Addington who are in some ways worse for offering sham legality as cover, being sought for war crimes and crimes against humanity.  

Sickening, but not unexpected: In his New York Times review of Jane Mayer’s new book, The Dark Side, Alan Brinkley describes how by the end of 2005, torture advocates within the Bush administration were fighting to continue their extreme detainee