Category: The Dish

Here’s Fresh Air’s interview with Jim Webb. He’s on a roll right now.

I’m used to being staggered by the disgusting indecency of th Bush administration’s embrace of torture. But whenever one feels that you cannot be shocked any more, we discover another atrocity. Here’s what we are now being told by the FBI:

According to the report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine, an FBI agent reported a detainee belonging to China’s ethnic Uighur minority and a Uighur translator told him Uighur detainees were kept awake for long periods, deprived of food and forced to endure cold for hours on end, just prior to questioning by Chinese interrogators.

Susan Manning, a lawyer who represents several Uighurs still held at Guantanamo, said Tuesday the allegations are all too familiar.

U.S. personnel "are engaging in abusive tactics on behalf of the Chinese," she said Tuesday. When Uighur detainees refused to talk to Chinese interrogators in 2002, U.S. military personnel put them in solitary confinement as punishment, she said.

The sleep deprivation, food manipulation, and hypothermia are classic Gestapo methods for torturing prisoners. And the United States now does these unspeakable acts at the behest of the Communist regime in China.

"We know from past campaigns that presidential candidates will say many things. But once they have the responsibility to govern the country and lead the world, that difference between what they said and what responsibilities they have to fulfill are vastly different. I’m very upset with John with some of the things he’s been saying. And I can’t get into the psychoanalysis of it. But I believe that John is smarter than some of the things he is saying. He is, he understands it more. John is a man who reads a lot, he’s been around the world. I want him to get above that and maybe when he gets into the general election, and becomes the general election candidate he will have a higher-level discourse on these things," – Senator Chuck Hagel.

(Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty.)

Drum counters Conor’s article on the lack of conservative narratives.

The US govertnment cannot get the benefit of the doubt with interrogation any more:

I was reading your post on Murat Kurnaz and I can’t help but think that the biggest tragedy in all of this is that we can’t feel certain about who is right.  It is fair to say that if we went about detaining numerous terrorist suspects and treated them as honored guests we’d have to deal with some allegation of torture regardless.  But with a track record of fair and just treatment, we could readily prove that these were lies to tarnish our image.  Unfortunately, our image has been tarnished through our own actions and thus, any allegation, no matter how outlandish, becomes believable.

We can only hope that after Bush is removed from power that the world will believe that these actions were an aberration launched by one failed presidency and that we are a better nation going forward.  If they do not, I cannot fathom the cost to our nation’s image.

Last night, the Dish’s discussion of the Kentucky exit polls asked: did some Kentucky voters just refuse to vote for a black man? Or are they just leery of candidates they don’t know well enough? And why doesn’t Clinton openly urge people not to vote for her on racist grounds?

Jim Baker, c/o the Economist:

The rebuilding may have benefited from government incompetence:

The people of New Orleans, Nicole Gelinas writes, have "been building and rebuilding on their own or with small-scale help, rather than under top-down decree–and, in the process, showing that thousands of individual planners are better than one master."

Obviously a small donor:

That’s the Clintons’ campaign right now. How many little boys’ video games will have to be donated to pay it off?