A six foot rabbit? A pooka?

Quark: Dershowitz on Torture: http://edition.cnn.com/2003/LAW/03/03/cnna.Dershowitz/

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Following the capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the question has become whether the senior al Qaeda leader will reveal key information about the terrorist network. If he doesn't, should he be tortured to make him tell what he knows?

CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer posed this question to noted author and Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz and Ken Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch.

BLITZER: Alan Dershowitz, a lot of our viewers will be surprised to hear that you think there are right times for torture. Is this one of those moments?

DERSHOWITZ: I don't think so. This is not the ticking-bomb terrorist case, at least so far as we know. Of course, the difficult question is the chicken-egg question: We won't know if he is a ticking-bomb terrorist unless he provides us information, and he's not likely to provide information unless we use certain extreme measures.

My basic point, though, is we should never under any circumstances allow low-level people to administer torture. If torture is going to be administered as a last resort in the ticking-bomb case, to save enormous numbers of lives, it ought to be done openly, with accountability, with approval by the president of the United States or by a Supreme Court justice. I don't think we're in that situation in this case.

BLITZER: Well, how do you know ...

DERSHOWITZ: So we might be close.

BLITZER: Alan, how do you know he doesn't have that kind of ticking-bomb information right now, that there's some plot against New York or Washington that he was involved in and there's a time sensitivity? If you knew that, if you suspected that, you would say [to] get the president to authorize torture.

DERSHOWITZ: Well, we don't know, and that's why [we could use] a torture warrant, which puts a heavy burden on the government to demonstrate by factual evidence the necessity to administer this horrible, horrible technique of torture. I would talk about nonlethal torture, say, a sterilized needle underneath the nail, which would violate the Geneva Accords, but you know, countries all over the world violate the Geneva Accords. They do it secretly and hypothetically, the way the French did it in Algeria. If we ever came close to doing it, and we don't know whether this is such a case, I think we would want to do it with accountability and openly and not adopt the way of the hypocrite.

2 DEGREES OF SEPARATION BETWEEN MUSSOLINI'S ITALY AND US

http://rfkin2008.wordpress.com/2008/05/11/rfk-jr-on-the-border-the-media...

"While 60 Minutes included extensive biographical information on JUSTICE (ANTONIN) SCALIA and his family, they identify his father as “a professor of romance languages at Brooklyn College” and failed to disclose that he was a member of the American-Italian Fascist Party during Mussolini’s regime in the 1930s.

This backdrop may reveal something about Justice Scalia’s apparent comfort with enlarging corporate and government power, including the use of torture – so long as it’s not punishment.

According to Alan Dershowitz who knew Scalia’s father at Brooklyn College, Scalia got his doctorate at Casa Italiano at Columbia at a time when in order to get your doctorate you had to swear an oath to Mussolini."

Just like the republicans I'm in favor of going back to the way things were too...

Lets go back to the rules and regulations put in place by FDR's admin.

Coming to the screening tomorrow of Rethink Afghanistan! Thanks Thom and Robert Greenwald. Let's rethink the entire military budget in light of budgetary constraints. Fund human needs, cut the military!

The "con" in "neo-con" does not stand for "constitution". I E-mailed Susan Collins yesterday excoriating her for her paranoid rant against "enemy combatants". She sez the Dems can't see terrorism when its right in front of them. I told her she can't see the Bill of Rights when they're right in front of her.

"No, I'm NOT illiterate!...my parents were married when I was born!."
- harry ashburn

Thom,

Now that the corporations own our government, what do you think the chances are of amending the Constitution to read "natural" citizens?

I'd say next to nil.

Frankly, I find it tiresome listening to what teabaggers are against; now, let’s hear about what they are for. Nothing positive will come out of this “tea party” in Nashville if it is just one big whine fest; if that is all it is, then its effect can only be seen as negative for getting anything accomplished in Washington. Up to this point, if you press an “independent” teabagger, you might get an unenlightening criticism of bank bailouts, the budget deficit and the policy stalemate in Washington (who doesn’t?); but when you ask them what they want done alternatively, they can’t get any more specific than maybe tax cuts—revealing themselves to be nothing more than the indolent followers of right-wing propaganda, or the unwitting pawns of corporations and Wall Street they claim to be independent of. Or maybe they are just purposefully uninformed and confused.

Instead of gathering together in Nashville to engage in self-indulgence, they should come out and say what they want lawmakers to do, and I don’t mean tedious generalities. Do they want health care reform, and what kind? Do they want a jobs bill? Do they support a green energy policy? Are they prepared to accept the steps necessary to bring such policies to fruition? Republicans don’t want any of these things and (most) Democrats claim to, so it ought to be obvious who needs to be moved. But if they just want to blame everyone equally, and in fact leave this convention without any firm and clear statements of action they want Washington to take to tackle present and future challenges, then where does that leave the country? To have right-wing politicians to give these people a level of power and influence that is more media creation than real, and claiming that this is a “mandate” for tax cuts and nothing else—and leave left-wing politicians hand-cuffed, groveling to please a constituency that can’t be pleased, and doesn’t even know what it wants?

The government has your baby's DNA
http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/02/04/baby.dna.government/?hpt=C1
When Annie Brown's daughter, Isabel, was a month old, her pediatrician asked Brown and her husband to sit down because he had some bad news to tell them: Isabel carried a gene that put her at risk for cystic fibrosis.
While grateful to have the information -- Isabel received further testing and she doesn't have the disease -- the Mankato, Minnesota, couple wondered how the doctor knew about Isabel's genes in the first place. After all, they'd never consented to genetic testing.
It's simple, the pediatrician answered: Newborn babies in the United States are routinely screened for a panel of genetic diseases. Since the testing is mandated by the government, it's often done without the parents' consent, according to Brad Therrell, director of the National Newborn Screening & Genetics Resource Center...

Chuckle8, Lindsey Williams is talking about the moneybrokers, the oil barons, the manipulators and the people outsourcing jobs to other countries with little concern for the average American. He may also be talking about sociopaths who lack a conscience.

Agree about banks, need to break up all large banks and AIG. I wish our Pres would take stance like Teddy Roosevelt, but he appears to be a Puppet of the banksters since so many of his allies, Emanuel, Giethner and Summers are all Goldman Sachs agents. When will the 3rd party start? Need a new Progressive Party that the few remaining sane Republicans and many Democrats and Independents can go to break the Republicrat hold on politics.