Dirty baker's dozen

Salon summarizes the case for some domestic high-value detainees. No, not a case for torturing them, only the case for detaining them.

An infection of evil

... and everyone has at least a touch of it.

We have to find the truth. At that point, I hope we'll demand punishment of the perpetrators, whose identities are already obvious, at least in outline.

It's amazing that Bill Clinton lost his law license for a lie under oath in response to a contrived definition of sex, yet Jay Bybee, to name one, who wrote memos laying the bullshit groundwork for a considered policy of torture, is a federal judge.

Making a get out of jail free card from bullshit

In this case, Mukasey is trying to create the presumption of good faith on the part of John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, Jay Bybee, William J. Haynes, et al. They were just advocating what they thought was legal for their client, the quivering cowardly mass of abject Bushists.

Yeah, sure.

They were rationalizing torture with creative legalisms that they knew were wrong.

Good faith torture

There is no end to the base corruption of our American ideals by the Bushist war criminals. CNN unhelpfully fails to link to the documents obtained by the ACLU, which are comically redacted almost to nothingness. Given what the Bushists admitted, it's hard to imagine what they censored.

The interrogator's "good faith" and "honest belief" that the interrogation will not cause such suffering protects the interrogator, the memo adds.

Jay Bybee thinks lack of specific intent to cause severe pain is exculpatory. Even if so, what about the second use? The torturers can hardly claim ignorance of the pain they're causing.

"Your honor, even though he screamed the first thirty-nine times I waterboarded him, I was sure it wouldn't hurt him the fortieth time."

Insane. Like the reasoning of a Soviet lawyer. Or a press release from Kim Il Sung.

And specific intent is inextricably a part of the first torture, too. The torturers specifically intended to use torture to force a prisoner to answer a question. For those of us who understand cause and effect normally, there's no separate proof: They chose these methods to elicit a response. It's not as though they just happened to waterboard prisoners because they didn't have anything else to do that day.

For this service to the Bushists, Bybee received a Federal Appeals Court judgeship. The least we can do is impeach the SOB for his crimes. And I don't care a whit if the Judiciary Committee glossed over them in 2004.