Sunday evening: the Masters, Lorena, Torture

-Tiger loses the Masters to Trevor (blame it on the putter); Lorena wins by 11 (!) and gains eligibility for Hall at age 26 and something (Karrie Webb is youngest at age 25 and something). Bully for the lad from South Africa and the lass from Mexico.

-from firedoglake and looseheadprop, more on torture. The author quotes Scalia, Yoo and Fitzgerald. Guess which two are bending the law to make torture look likes it's legal? Fools. Bully for the guy whose name starts with an F. From the blog:

From the Indictment:

....defendant herein, an Officer of the Chicago Police Department, while acting under color of law, used a dangerous weapon to strike Victim A repeatedly, while Victim A was handcuffed and shackled in a wheelchair in Norwegian American Hospital, resulting in bodily injuries to Victim A, thereby willfully depriving Victim A of a right secured and protected by the Constitution and laws of the United States, that is, the right to be free from the use of unreasonable force by a person acting under color of law;...

From the press release: [pdf]

"Every citizen, regardless of being in police custody, has a Constitutional right to be free from the use of unreasonable force by law enforcement officers." Mr. Fitzgerald said.

Late Sunday Funnies: More Black and White, Torture, Rain

Pictures: views at the lake and in town...

WaPo's top story has to do with the supposed briefing of Congress on the way we have tortured enemy combatants in our search for intelligence. Way back in 2002. Four members of Congress. Under oath never to whisper a word that they had heard. No notes. No advisers or assistants. I think this is old news and its reemergence certainly comes at a propitious time, what with the recent revelations of the CIA's destruction of tapes of interrogation sessions (more here on that story). Hmmmm.

Lots of rain today. Diane and I cannot remember the last time it rained like it did earlier today - waves of fairly heavy downpours. It's good - our water tables have to be pretty low.

Steelers and Pats playing now; Colts and Ravens later. Go Colts.

Another Monday: Waterboarding, Pakistan, Manchester

Notes to get a week started:

-WAPO has an article by a former JAG who used to lecture soldiers on the niceties of the law and their responsibilities when guarding prisoners. The drift: waterboarding has been illegal, and recognized as so, for a long time. He offers several examples from the past, including one of a Texas sheriff as recently as 1983 getting ten years in prison for forcing confessions and using simulated drowning in the process. The Japanese also used a waterboarding during WWII and were tried for such in the trials after the conclusion of the war.

Diane recalls (in a comment on a previous blog) a Hollywood rendition of waterboarding: the ways the Salem witches were encouraged to confess to their devilish ways was to tie them up, suspend them from a long pole and dip them head first into a body of water over and over till they admitted their wrong doings.

(I just remembered my own experience with near drowning: at my great aunt Clara's cottage on Klinger Lake near Niles, Michigan: another young boy and I (might have been 11 or 12) had apparently had some disagreement while playing in the lake; he got me in a head lock and just kept pushing me underwater and holding me there, letting me up for air, then pushing me under again, over and over. I survived (!) but clearly remember it as a dastardly thing to do; scary as well.)

-also from WAPO, the mess in Pakistan gets messier with civil rights abandoned, opposition leaders being jailed, reporters being sent away, and Condi Rice reviewing the $150 million a month in aid that goes to Musharraf and his thugs. (I can think of better ways to spend that money, can't you?)

-Manchester and Goodbye, Darkness: Just in the early stages of the battle for Iwo Jima, a small bit of rock and lava that was critical in the plans to defeat Japan. (It was strategically placed in the Allies' air lane to the Japanese homeland and afforded the Japanese a two hour warning of impending bombardment when spotters on Iwo Jima radioed when hearing/seeing planes overhead.) Japanese have dug in and have no illusions of coming out alive and want the invaders to pay dearly. We do.

This is the first time that I have read to any extent about the war in the Pacific. Did a lot of reading of the European theater of operations as a college student and then down through the years. Kind of funny that being the case especially with my service years being spent not only in the navy but also in the Far East. Guess I was involved in other pursuits at the time...

Enough of all that bad stuff happening to others. Heading to the golf course. Guess what - another good golf day.

Friday Follies: Torture, Lions

-from Dana Milbank and WAPO: Reports on a Human Rights briefing on torture which includes comments by people who have actually gone through waterboarding in past wars. Bush described as having successfully bridged the 21st century with the 15th century with regards to weapons used to fight wars. The 15th century, of course, is when the Spanish Inquisition refined the different ways people could be treated to ensure some kind of confession, including waterboarding.

(BTW, from the SI link, "...The methods of torture most used by the Inquisition were garrucha, toca and the potro. The application of the garrucha, also known as the strappado, consisted of suspending the criminal from the ceiling by a pulley with weights tied to the ankles, with a series of lifts and drops, during which arms and legs suffered violent pulls and were sometimes dislocated.^[28]. The toca, also called tortura del agua, consisted of introducing a cloth into the mouth of the victim, and forcing them to ingest water spilled from a jar so that they had impression of drowning.^[29] The potro, the rack, was the instrument of torture used most frequently...." and "...Some of the torture methods attributed to the Spanish Inquisition were never used. For example, the "Iron Maiden" never existed in Spain, and was a post-Reformation invention of Germany. Thumbscrews on display in an English museum as Spanish were recently argued to be of English origin...." Good to know.)

Let me see now, projecting us into the future some 500 years, what shall we call this episode in American history? The Bush Inquisition? The Lost Decade? The Stupid-I-Forgot-Who-We-Were Years?

Enough of that. It's lovely out there once again. Sun is shining, temperatures in the mild range. Another beautiful day. Breakfast at the Cabin this morning with Jim and Wilma and a lot of Catholics in after their morning Mass. Jim and Wilma and a host of other Loogooteeites heading to Muncie and Anderson later today. Girls volleyball team going for the gold. Go Lions! (Lionesses? Lionettes?)