"What would an objective article on waterboarding have looked like during the Bush administration? A history of the practice would have to state that the US government considered it torture for several decades and that this status was essentially unquestioned until after September 11th. It would also record that the US had hanged Japanese soldiers for waterboarding US POWs, and perhaps that as Governor of Texas, Bush had imprisoned a sheriff for waterboarding a prisoner. It would describe the experience of being waterboarded as essentially like the experience of being drowned, and record that there were often lingering psychological effects. Against that, such an article would have to report that legal memoranda had argued that waterboarding was not torture and was legal. It might also report that some people responded to the September 11th attacks by arguing that even torture should be justified as a response to terrorism.

"That article would have been objective in even the restrictive sense that the American media uses. Every claim is not only true, but unambiguous and part of the public record.

"And I don’t recall seeing anything like that during the Bush era. Individual claims might appear in an article about the waterboarding debate, but I never remember seeing a single article that would give the  full picture. 

"Journalists are sometimes criticized for treating both sides of any disagreement as equally respectable, even if the facts are squarely on one side. But we can see that it’s not just that–the media won’t even collect and report facts that aren’t in dispute, if the net effect would be to undermine the claims of one side."

"Bliss it was in that atrocity to be alive, but to be on the internet was very heaven."

"What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.
A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?
The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it."

"Dick Cheney was a self-aggrandizing criminal who used his knowledge as a Washington insider to subvert both informed public debate about matters of war and peace and to manipulate presidential decisionmaking, sometimes in ways that angered even George W. Bush. 
After his early years of public service, he capitalized on connections he made while being paid by taxpayers to earn tens of millions of dollars presiding over Halliburton. While there, he did business with corrupt Arab autocrats, including some in countries that were enemies of the United States. Upon returning to government, he advanced a theory of the executive that is at odds with the intentions of the founders, successfully encouraged the federal government to illegally spy on innocent Americans, passed on to the public false information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and became directly complicit in a regime of torture for which he should be in jail."

Lots to say here... For the moment, cf. Gellner on procedural justification as part of the core of liberalism.

"Did You See John Yoo's Easter Sunday Op-Ed? In the Washington Post: "Crucifixion is legal when ordered by the president in his role as commander-in-chief of the armed forces.""

"My gut reaction on reading Marc Thiessen's new book ... was: "Why is a speechwriter who's never served in the military or intelligence community acting as an expert on interrogation and national security?" Certainly, everyone is entitled to a voice in the debate over the lawfulness and efficacy of President Bush's abusive interrogation program, regardless of qualifications. But if you're not an expert on a subject, shouldn't you interview experts before expressing an opinion? Instead, Thiessen relies solely on the opinions of the CIA interrogators who used torture and abuse and are thus most vulnerable to prosecution for war crimes. That makes his book less a serious discussion of interrogation policy than a literary defense of war criminals. Nowhere in this book will you find the opinions of experienced military interrogators who successfully interrogated Islamic extremists.... Courting Disaster is nothing more than the defense's opening statement in a war crimes trial."

A. Serwer on the analogy between Yoo and the other torture-memo lawyers and Fadl and the others who cooked up "apostasy" as an excuse for Muslim terrorism.

Perhaps the most horrifying thing I have read this year.

"Today marks a grim anniversary, a day when a few fanatics, equipped and secretly encouraged by foreign ideologues, struck a violent blow against normal, civil, democratic society. In the years that followed, the events of that day led to further tragedy, as a once-civilized country turned to the widespread practice of torture. Perhaps now at last we can gain some perspective on this history, and better understand what the defense of a democratic society demands of us. --- Today is also the anniversary of an attack on New York City and Washington, DC."

"You know, were I the guy whose unit failed to capture a seventy-year-old, two meter tall man on kidney dialysis, I wouldn’t be mentioning that as proof of my skills in intelligence gathering."

The "mosaic philosophy" bit in particular is so crazy that "utter stupidity" is hardly adequate.

Krugman's long-form take on what Obama should do, domestically, in year 1. Where do I sign up to help pressure Obama to do all this?

(And, in a "why oh why can't have a better press" moment, why does our leading public intellectual have to publish this in Rolling Stone, of all places?)

Who hasn't been thinking this?

"McClatchy is truly the most badass MSM crew there is. Marisa Taylor actually wrote a piece that will appear in newspapers across this great country about prosecuting Bush for war crimes."

Yes: "I’m half inclined to say there should be neither truth nor reconciliation. Instead, George W. Bush should be kidnapped, drugged, flown to Spain in an unmarked plane, and wake up on the streets of Madrid tied up with a bunch of files and evidence pinned to his chest so Judge Garzón can sort the whole thing out. If anyone asks how that happened, deny knowledge and mention “executive privilege.” "

Is it still a witch-hunt if they really are witches?

"If you had asked me in 1998 what I thought the consequences would be if the United States government was revealed in public to have officially sanctioned torture ... I would have said that this revelation would be an enormous scandal with catastrophic po

Impeach them. Impeach them now.

"Close it down. Move the remaining prisoners stateside and give them trials. Torch the camp. Issue a press release. And walk away."

White House Office of Legal Counsel lawyer has _himself_ water-boarded to see if it is in fact torture; concludes that it is; writes opinion to that effect; gets fired by Gonzalez.