He's thinking a making a stern phone call to Musharraf. Maybe. After he cleared some more brush. In the meantime he's probably wondering how to pull the same trick here 'cuz...
"Things would be a whole lot easier if this were a Dictatorship - as long as I'm the Dictator."
They keep telling us "we're turning a corner" and "Iraq is getting better" - the violence in Iraq is down (because all the Ethnic Cleansing has just about been completed) yet we just broke the annual world record (again) for the number of American Military Deaths in that country.
Er, or not.
God, can't you hear that groan?
It's like 100 freight trains grumbling under the Rockies.
It seems to me that Keith Olbermann hears the groan... like a clarion call.
Full Transcript
Olbermann Special Comment on Torture: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arWJ358tZgUDaniel Levin should have a statue in his honor in Washington right now. Instead, he was forced out as acting assistant attorney general nearly three years ago because he had the guts to do what George Bush could not do in a million years, actually put himself at risk for the sake of his country, for the sake of what is right, and they water boarded him. And he wrote that even though he knew those doing it meant him no harm, and he knew they would rescue him at the instant of a slightest distress, and he knew he would not die, still with all that reassurance, he could not stop the terror screaming from inside of him, could not quell the horror, could not convince that which is at the core of each of us, the entity who exists behind all the embellishments we strap to ourself, like purpose and name and family and love, he could not convince his being that he wasn‘t drowning.
Water boarding, he said, is torture. Legally it is torture. Practically it is torture. Ethically it is torture. And he wrote it down. Wrote it down somewhere where it could be contrasted with the words of this country‘s 43rd president. The United States of America does not torture. Made you into a liar, Mr. Bush. Made you into, if anybody had the guts to pursue it, a criminal, Mr. Bush.
The Criminal Conspiracy that Olbermann speaks of was revealed long ago when Alberto Gonzales wrote the first torture memo - long before the infamous Bybee document - that directed the President to deny Geneva conventions to terrorist detainees not because they didn't "deserve them" but specifically to prevent being prosecuted for War Crimes.
Olberman's question of what might happen if a detainee were to die during waterboarding or "intense interrogation" isn't just a "hypothetical" - some of the abused detainees at Abu Ghriab died.
Amnesty International has reported that at least 34 detainees have died in U.S. Custody, some of them as the result of Homocide during Interrogation.
It is now known that at least 34 detainees who died in US custody have had their deaths listed by the army as confirmed or suspected criminal homicides. The true number of such deaths may be higher as there is evidence that delays, cover-ups and deficiencies in investigations have hampered the collection of evidence.(5) In several cases, however, substantial evidence has emerged that detainees were tortured to death while under interrogation (revealed, for example, in military autopsy reports, investigation records and recent court testimony). What is even more disturbing is that standard practices as well as interrogation techniques believed to have fallen within officially sanctioned parameters, appear to have played a role in the ill-treatment...
So the idea that somebody might die - eventually - isn't just a paranoid fantasy. It's already happened, repeatedly.
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