Saturday, March 08, 2008

Torture Officially OK

Update: Canada's intelligence service(CSIS) rejected the use of evidence against alleged terrorists in Ottawa and Montreal because the information was obtained from the waterboarding of Al Qaeda's Abu Zubaydah Newsweek reports. A CSIS spokesman has stated that the agency considers evidence obtained by torture to be morally repugnant and not reliable. It will not knowing use such tainted information. The Canadians excised statements obtained from Zubaydah linking a suspect to Al Qaeda from a dossier. CSIS replaced the statements with evidence from public documents.

The torturer- in-chief made good on his threat to veto the bill outlawing waterboarding. Congressional Democrats probably do not have enough votes to override it since the measure passed both houses on partisan votes. So the United States of America, "the greatest democracy on Earth", officially joins the ranks of banana republics, communist dictatorships and totalitarian theocracies in the march of history.

From a new book about the Charlatan's failure to act despite repeated warnings from American intelligence about an imminent attack at home: "The warnings were going straight to President Bush each morning in his briefings by the CIA director, George Tenet, and in the presidential daily briefings. It would later be revealed by the 9/11 commission into the September 11 attacks that more than 40 presidential briefings presented to Bush from January 2001 through to September 10, 2001, included references to bin Laden" [1]. The threat of hijacked airliners being used as missles by terrorists was so palpable prior to September 11th that the Defense Department had already conducted drills at the Pentagon to prepare for such an attack. Feel safe yet?
[1]The Commission, Phillip Shenon (2008)