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Clearly not a true American.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppaGk0_PSYk

A certain someone seems to have become increasingly bitter since the elections. A break from MT seems like a good idea.

daemon wrote:

That might be me.

It might be true of you for the reasons you cite, but you weren't in my mind when I posted. I was responding to user.

Ali Soufan, a former FBI interrogator, revealed in an article being released in June that Osama Bin Laden's bodyguard opened up about the 9/11 terror attacks only after being offered -- sugar free cookies.

Bin Laden lieutenant Abu Jandal is a diabetic, Soufan said, and wouldn't eat sugar cookies he'd been offered.

"Soufan noticed that he didn't touch any of the cookies that had been served with tea: 'He was a diabetic and couldn't eat anything with sugar in it,' Time's Bobby Ghosh wrote. "At their next meeting, the Americans brought him some sugar-free cookies, a gesture that took the edge off Abu Jandal's angry demeanor.

"We had showed him respect, and we had done this nice thing for him," Soufan told Ghosh. "So he started talking to us instead of giving us lectures."

The seemingly absurd report calls into question the efficacy of the Bush administration's so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques." A 2005 memo by a Bush administration official revealed that CIA interrogators had waterboarded alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times in one month.

"It took more questioning, and some interrogators' sleight of hand, before the Yemeni gave up a wealth of information about al-Qaeda — including the identities of seven of the 9/11 bombers — but the cookies were the turning point," Ghosh writes.

"After that, he could no longer think of us as evil Americans," Soufan said. "Now he was thinking of us as human beings."

Soufan's comments come on the heels of statements by a former military interrogator who said that he believed that the Bush administration's torture policies actually cost "hundreds -- if not thousands" of American lives.

“Torture does not save lives,” the interrogator, who spoke under a pseudonym, said. “And the reason why is that our enemies use it, number one, as a recruiting tool…These same foreign fighters who came to Iraq to fight because of torture and abuse….literally cost us hundreds if not thousands of American lives.”

Link.

bratboy wrote:

Ali Soufan, a former FBI interrogator, revealed in an article being released in June that Osama Bin Laden's bodyguard opened up about the 9/11 terror attacks only after being offered -- sugar free cookies.

Bin Laden lieutenant Abu Jandal is a diabetic, Soufan said, and wouldn't eat sugar cookies he'd been offered.

"Soufan noticed that he didn't touch any of the cookies that had been served with tea: 'He was a diabetic and couldn't eat anything with sugar in it,' Time's Bobby Ghosh wrote. "At their next meeting, the Americans brought him some sugar-free cookies, a gesture that took the edge off Abu Jandal's angry demeanor.

"We had showed him respect, and we had done this nice thing for him," Soufan told Ghosh. "So he started talking to us instead of giving us lectures."

The seemingly absurd report calls into question the efficacy of the Bush administration's so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques." A 2005 memo by a Bush administration official revealed that CIA interrogators had waterboarded alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times in one month.

"It took more questioning, and some interrogators' sleight of hand, before the Yemeni gave up a wealth of information about al-Qaeda — including the identities of seven of the 9/11 bombers — but the cookies were the turning point," Ghosh writes.

"After that, he could no longer think of us as evil Americans," Soufan said. "Now he was thinking of us as human beings."

Soufan's comments come on the heels of statements by a former military interrogator who said that he believed that the Bush administration's torture policies actually cost "hundreds -- if not thousands" of American lives.

“Torture does not save lives,” the interrogator, who spoke under a pseudonym, said. “And the reason why is that our enemies use it, number one, as a recruiting tool…These same foreign fighters who came to Iraq to fight because of torture and abuse….literally cost us hundreds if not thousands of American lives.”

Link.

Damn it, bratboy, quit serving up examples of competent interrogaters at work. Torture gets the most return for your effort. Everyone knows that.

As I stated before, even the Romans knew that torture wouldn't produce good information. It was and is useful to elicit false confessions for show trials.

...and now General Petraeus suggests Geneva Conventions were violated:

“When we have taken steps that have violated the Geneva Conventions we rightly have been criticized, so as we move forward I think it’s important to again live our values, to live the agreements that we have made in the international justice arena and to practice those,” Gen. Petraeus said on Fox News Friday afternoon.

Petraeus made the comment in the context of being asked about the Bush administration’s so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The now-Central Command chief said he believed that banning the more extreme techniques had taken away “a tool” employed by “our enemies” as a moral argument against the United States.

Petraeus didn’t say which parts of the Geneva Conventions he thought he and other administration officials had violated.

Asked about a “ticking time bomb” scenario — which is often employed by torture’s defenders — Petraeus said that interrogation methods approved for use in the Army Field Manual were generally sufficient.

“There might be an exception and that would require extraordinary but very rapid approval to deal with but for the vast majority of the cases our experience… is that the techniques that are in the Army Field Manual that lays out how we treat detainees, how we interrogate them, those techniques work, that’s our experience in this business,” he said.

Link.

ShnickyShnack wrote:

Sad part of all of this is the fact that Dubya's boosters could never understand what his policies really meant: the removal of the rule of law and the placing into the hands of the president and his cronies the power of a king.

All Hail King Obama!

Hank Rearden wrote:

ShnickyShnack wrote:

Sad part of all of this is the fact that Dubya's boosters could never understand what his policies really meant: the removal of the rule of law and the placing into the hands of the president and his cronies the power of a king.

Admittedly, it's now worse after Bush than before. But, I always found, while living in the ol' US of A, that the best way to understand the role of the president was to imagine him to be a sort of elected king.

A constitutional monarch?

It definitely felt like the Empire under Reagan.  He even tried to build his own Death Star! ...or something

Bat wrote:

The Imperial Presidency is usually held to have begun with Nixon, waned a bit with Watergate, and come back with Reagan. Clinton was too dilatory early on, too embattled later, to really have it. Bush the Elder was more the managerial type.

(Emperor Gore... iDunno, that's just a tough one to get a handle on).

"I have ridden the mighty moon worm"

Technically the other two branches are supposed to keep the executive in line. But the secrecy habits of the modern presidency make this difficult. Judges need evidence, but if the evidence is withheld-- it being a stat secret, of course, the judge can't do squat. And the bush administration had a habit of briefing only the gang of four

JUST four members of Congress were notified in 2002 when the Central Intelligence Agency's ''enhanced interrogation techniques'' program was first approved and carried out, according to documents released by the agency last week. They were Senators Bob Graham and Richard Shelby and Representatives Porter Goss and Nancy Pelosi, then the chairmen and ranking members of the Senate and House intelligence committees -- the so-called ''Gang of Four.'' Each was briefed orally and it was understood that they were not to speak about the program with anyone, including their colleagues on the committees.

source
Since legislators derive their power from committees (including the committee of the whole) their power to do anything but privately disapprove is quite limited.