Ashcroft, Gonzales, Feith, Rove, etc, etc, can’t screen their audiences the way GWB, Cheney, & the rest of the BushCo boys & girls still in power can. Hence this kind of questioning, heckling, demonstrations… How awkward for them, as they make the rounds of their speaking engagement calendars.

Not well prepped for a challenging question was our Mr. Ashcroft. If that’s all they’ve got going for a defense, they’ve got very little. Time to bone up on those Sen. reservations, JA, you’ll be asked again, maybe much more harshly, & the angry bluster won’t cut it then either.

Ashcroft & the others don’t seem to fathom how bad it’s going to get out there, that the blowback won’t just blow over. Their actions called down the Furies, & as we know from studying our mythology, the Furies never stop their pursuit.

You say tomato, I say torture.

Mr. Ashcroft’s Christian guilt was peeking through his loyal courtier’s well-paid via DOJ contracts hide. His anger-as-defense mechanism was in overdrive. He ranted about an immaterial distinction between methods of enforced drowning. NOT “simulated” drowning; there’s no pretend water filling the lungs when using either method, it’s the real thing.

When used as torture rather than as a method of assassination, torturers stop the drowning before they kill the victim, though torturers aren’t always able to judge how far an exhausted victim can go, especially when they the repeat the torture several times in a row.

Mr. Ashcroft couldn’t answer the question because to do so honestly would put him in jail. Herr Alstoetter, er, Mr. Ashcroft is justifiably scared and hiding from the truth. If his claims to being a devoted Christian are true, he should also be losing sleep, which seems appropriate since his prisoners were often deprived of it for days on end, another acknowledged form of torture. More than 100 US prisoners died in our custody, some from enjoying the water treatment.

As the chief legal officer of the United States, whose office issued the flawed opinions that purported to authorize torture, partly by definitional sleight-of-hand, who personally and repeatedly authorized his government to torture its prisoners, Mr. Ashcroft is criminally liable. He’s not alone.

I think a video is critical here, and there must be one. The excerpt above seems a transcription- it reads like a play; If accurate, it will no doubt be viral.

If she ran home and immediately wrote the post, then it could well be highly accurate even without some kind of memory aid, such as a tape. That she admitted to be very excited is consistent with this. It is only after “coming down” from the sympathetic surge (in the autonomic sense, not feeling for others) that you start to convert the memory from concrete to abstract.

As many of you probably know (being lawyers), there’s a reason why contemporaneous notes are taken more seriously than jottings made much later.

OTOH a panicked Bushco may start WW3.

Senate Reservations to UN Convention against Torture

http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/usdocs/tortres.html

Forced v pouring? AFAIK, all “waterboarding” methods are forced.

In the Philippines when US interferred in Philippines’ rebellion to evict Spanish colonialists, US poured water thru a funnel into throat of the forcibly restrained victim.
In the recent “waterboarding” as allegedly explained, water poured onto cloth was maintained as air-barrier on forcibly restrained victim’s breathing orifices…until unstoppable urge to breathe brought the water into lungs, etc.

Note that latter method follows recent torture tutorial of having victim self-administer the effect, as promulagated by military/spook “consultants”. […gambling in “clever strokes” which constitutes the very essence of theft, swindling and all sorts of similar anti-social deeds.” PKropotkin’s Memoirs, ca 1899″

Well, the thing about “apples and oranges” is: they’re both fruit.