Is there anyone who’ll make or take a wager; that “Olde Deadeye” will come clean on his own dime?

Ambassador Joseph Wilson, has recently commented on VP Cheney’s hypocracy, when it comes to torture and the release of classified testimony and information.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-04-26/freedom-of-disinformation/2

The former VP would like selected portions of now classified information to be released; that supposedly exonerates his advocacy for the use of torture.

While at any time, past and future, Mr. Cheney could of his own volition, release his testimony concerning the outing of CIA NOC, Valarie Plame.

Now, in a single week, President Obama has eliminated two-thirds of that successful-but-not-sufficient national defense troika because his personal ideology — a fair gist of which is “If the world likes us more we are more secure” — cannot tolerate harsh interrogation techniques, torture or coercive interviews, call them what you will. Surprisingly, Obama now stands alongside Bush as a genuine American Jacobin, both of them seeing the world as they want it to be, not as it is. Whereas Bush saw a world of Muslims yearning to betray their God for Western secularism, Obama gazes upon a globe that he regards as largely carnivore-free and believes that remaining threats can be defused by semantic warfare; just stop saying “War on Terror” and give talks in Turkey and on al-Arabiyah television, for example.

Americans should be clear on what Obama has done. In a breathtaking display of self-righteousness and intellectual arrogance, the president told Americans that his personal beliefs are more important than protecting their country, their homes and their families. The interrogation techniques in question, the president asserted, are a sign that Americans have lost their “moral compass,” a compliment similar to Attorney General Eric Holder’s identifying them as “moral cowards.” Mulling Obama’s claim, one can wonder what could be more moral for a president than doing all that is needed to defend America and its citizens? Or, asked another way, is it moral for the president of the United States to abandon intelligence tools that have saved the lives and property of Americans and their allies in favor of his own ideological beliefs?

Eric Margolis

http://www.lewrockwell.com/margolis/margolis145.html

Go ahead, keep up the vengeful attacks, it will please our enemies, and demoralize our country. I’m beginning to realize that people like you and the author have placed vengence over country. Rev. Wright would love you.

In an essay well known to the American founders, “That Politics may be Reduced to a Science,” David Hume wrote that “A constitution is only so far good, as it provides a remedy against maladministration.” Mere knowledge that crimes were committed is not in itself a remedy. It is necessary that the people responsible for acts of maladministration be rooted out and exposed to public opprobrium. If they committed crimes, they ought to be punished just as other citizens are, without any benefit owing to their official status. Praise of the good is meaningless where blame of the bad is prohibited. So long as servile lawyers and compliant executioners, who work in the dark, continue to be sheltered in the dark, every whistle-blower is at risk by his very loyalty to a public good that trusts the light of day.

Let us never forget that the Bush-Cheney administration, under the Military Commissions Act of 2006–a law drafted by some of the same parties that devised the rationale for torture–was given the power to seek punishments by secret tribunals against defendants with evidence obtained under torture. We are speaking not about a few mistakes, but an influential distortion of the American constitution, put into practice by military police and military lawyers, after being drafted by government lawyers higher up, all with the consent of both houses of Congress.
[...]

The Bill of Rights outlaws torture, explicitly, in two of its ten amendments, the fifth and the eighth.

All Americans ought to know this; and President Obama might take the opportunity to say it some day: it could not hurt his position.

“No person,” says the fifth amendment, “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” Torture is compulsion; its purpose, when used as evidence in a military tribunal, is to compel the prisoner to serve as a witness against himself.

As Leonard Levy points out in Origins of the Bill of Rights, the history of this particular right lies in the horror of the American founders at the arbitrariness of Roman law and its legacy of ex officio oaths and coerced confessions.

The non-conforming Protestants whose spirit animates the Constitution were looking to assure that nothing in the history of this country would resemble the Star-Chamber proceedings under Charles I.

The language of the eighth amendment is even plainer: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

Writes Levy: “Cruel and unusual punishment referred to methods of punishment as well as their severity; they had to be as swift and painless as possible and in no circumstances involve a lingering death or any form of torture.”

Any form of torture: let those words stand alone against the hairsplitting sophistries of John Yoo and Jay Bybee

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-bromwich/follow-the-evidence_b_190750.html

http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/david-bromwich/

The peaceful transfer of power is the cornerstone of our Republic, but when a new administration attacks the previous administration,(especially on grossly trumped up charges) our whole system will collapse. Anyone with an important government position will become frozen and not likely to take controversial, but necessary actions for fear that the next administration may capriciously change the rules and definitions(waterboarding is redefined as torture) and come after them in an ex-post-facto witch hunt. Your obvious hatred and obsession with all things Bush has blinded you from seeing the damage this Inquisition will cause, and has destroyed your ability to reason, if you ever had it.

BTW, an inside tip: I worked for a news channel — an international news channel — that forbade its newswriters from using any AFP stories for any reason, even as a second source. AFP was considered too unreliable a news organization. I’m not saying this story is wrong, just that AFP ain’t exactly the BBC.

A new Gallup Poll finds 51% of Americans in favor and 42% opposed to an investigation into the use of harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects during the Bush administration. At the same time, 55% of Americans believe in retrospect that the use of the interrogation techniques was justified, while only 36% say it was not. Notably, a majority of those following the news about this matter “very closely” oppose an investigation and think the methods were justified.

There’s no mention of how many Americans support waterboarding Nancy Pelosi.

They want to finish their studies. Torture!