The Shame of Nations

U.S. Soldiers will be tortured under this “compromise” within the year. I promise you. American citizens will be extraordinarily rendered, following the American model of sending off Canadians, to torture holes around the world. And the torturers will cite, chapter and verse, this cowardly compromise.

Following the battle plan of the war in Vietnam our leaders are destroying America to save America.

… the three rebel senators achieved only modest improvements on the White House’s original positions. They wanted to bar evidence obtained through coercion. Now, they have agreed to allow it if a judge finds it reliable (which coerced evidence hardly can be) and relevant to guilt or innocence. The way coercion is measured in the bill, even those protections would not apply to the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.

The deal does next to nothing to stop the president from reinterpreting the Geneva Conventions. While the White House agreed to a list of “grave breaches” of the conventions that could be prosecuted as war crimes, it stipulated that the president could decide on his own what actions might be a lesser breach of the Geneva Conventions and what interrogation techniques he considered permissible

NY Times

The national Democratic Party is no longer worth the cement needed to sink it to the bottom of the sea. For an entire week, it allowed a debate on changing the soul of the country to be conducted intramurally between the Torture Porn and Useful Idiot wings of the Republican Party, the latter best exemplified by John McCain, who keeps fashioning his apparently fathomless ambition into a pair of clown shoes with which he can do the monkey dance across the national stage. They’re laughing at him, too.

Charles Pierce at Tapped

Here is Marty Lederman with the most worked out critique of the scat so far. First take, second and the latest by guest blogger Sandy Levinson.