Graham should make lawyers ashamed to be in the same room with him. What a whanker.

Lindsay Graham is going to have to eat some crow. He got himself into a nice fix, now. “If,” Lindsay??? Shall we refer for prosecution now?

Thanks, EW, and congrats on the award!

Bob in HI

Speaking of passive aggression, what about the way Graham kept calling Soufan a “great American” to his face?

Sure it’s worked for 500 years. It’s succeeded in getting the tortured to confess what the torturers wanted, true or not.

Marcy, congrats from an EW addict, an addiction that benefits me every day. Well done and well deserved!
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It’s clear that Cheney and the other GOPers showing up on the “news” shows are trying really hard to lie so much that the press and pundits will change their so-called reality. They want to control the conversation: we didn’t torture, the dem’s were briefed and didn’t say anything, the Geneva conventions didn’t count, anything the President does is legal, and whatever techniques we used/didn’t use got results that saved our collective asses over the last six years. So there!

It’s an effort to enter into Weird World, where every mirror shows us a new and strange reflection, altering reality into something so insane that we can’t handle it and turn the TeeVee off and stop thinking about it all. But NPR is leading everything this afternoon with reports and quotes and clips from the hearing, discussing the issue, using the word “torture”. They just called the testimony “compelling”.

Graham is working this as hard as he can. The result of the kind of narrative that Sen. Whitehouse stated in the opening of the hearing will be deadly for the leaders of the last eight years. Feinstein’s statement that the SIC will undertake a lengthy investigation ensures the issue and documents stay in the public eye. It all adds another round of nails in the coffin of the GOP. I think the torture issue is catching fire and likely to accelerate.

Graham is a desperate person doing everything he can to try to put out a rapidly spreading fire that threatens to destroy his world. (It’s rare that a person from Santa Barbara roots for the fire, but in this case, I’ll make an exception…)

Graham’s probably only aiming for the 3-5 second Faux sound bite. These guys just flail from one news cycle to the next, depending on the absence of anyone with a memory or reasoning ability. Ooops.

Another point is how Graham attacked Soufan for being repulsed by the torture he observed. The Brits did it to the Irish (which also blew up in their face when it was disclosed that they got false confessions from innocent people), the Israelis did it, and by golly gosh the Federales, Carbinieri…(and he forgot…North Koreans, North Vietnamese, Nazis, and Argentine junta) all did it!

And then sly old fox, Linseed says…and “Justice Stevens would say that your interrogation in the hospital constituted torture, too!”

Except that Justice Stevens never said that hospital interrogations were torture…what Stevens said was that they were “TORTUOUS”…which doesn’t mean TORTUROUS.

“Tortuous” means either “twisting” (as in an argument, as in ‘Lindsey Grahams’ logic was tortuous as well as being specious.’) or it can mean ’subject to the civil liability or tort laws’.

In the case Chavez vs. Martinez Kennedy, Ginsburg and Stevens were in the minority in arguing that a protracted interrogation of an individual in a hospital while they were in pain and during active treatment constituted a violation of that individuals 5th Amendment Rights. There was no claim that this violated the defendants 8th Amendment rights. The majority stated that since the confession was not used in a trial or to obtain evidence it did not violate the 5th Amendment.

Stevens was in the minority. What Soufan did was far less egregious that what Martinez did to Chavez..he didn’t disrupt medical treatment. And only interrogated Abu Zubaydah when he wasn’t being operated on. That falls well within the actual Supreme Court decision.

Graham was making a false threat and comparing what Soufan did to what the contract interrogators did is simply a case of ignoring the relative degree of what might cause physical or mental distress. Graham argues that anything short of killing or maiming the individual isn’t torture, it seems. For him death and disfigurement…not “cruel and unusual” is the standard. But one can kill or dismember someone without pain…without cruelty. Cruelty is in the infliction of pain and mental anguish. Those are, by their very nature, pyschological states. Torture is psychological.

Zelikow on Rachel sounds like a zombie in a tunnel.

Ooops. Zelilow lies. Sez U.S. has never used torture, whereas it’s as apple pie as mother. (Or whatever.) See Nosenko, who was treated just like an “unlawful combatant.”

Interrogators from the Soviet Russia division suspected that that Nosenko was a KGB plant and thus Nosenko was seized by CIA officers in Washington and from 1964 to 1967 was held in solitary confinement in a CIA safe house in Clinton, Maryland. Nosenko was also subjected to sensory deprivation and was administered drugs because his CIA handlers believed he was still working in secret for the KGB. Agents also strapped wires to his head, telling him falsely that the device was an electroencephalograph which would allow them to read his mind, while the device was really one that read brainwave patterns. This was a form of psychological intimidation in order to help persuade him to “tell the truth”. He was interrogated for 1,277 days.

My understanding was that the wounds were to his legs and stomach.

After the beating I was then placed in the small box. They placed a cloth or cover over the box to cut out all light and restrict my air supply. As it was not high enough even to sit upright, I had to crouch down. It was very difficult because of my wounds. The stress on my legs held in this position meant my wounds both in the leg and stomach became very painful. I think this occurred about 3 months after my last operation. It was always cold in the room, but when the cover was placed over the box it made it hot and sweaty inside. The wound on my leg began to open and started to bleed. I don’t know how long I remained in the small box, I think I may have slept or maybe fainted.

OT — I wonder whether the “new arguments” against releasing the pictures that Obama ordered the lawyers to raise to the court will be made public, vs. in secret / in camera.

Having read a little more about the admin’s actual chances to block release of the images, it seems that this really will be just a delay. So… enough to get through McChrystal’s confirmation? That depends on the Tillmans, and the ability of the rest of us to get the assassination and torture reporting highlighted.