The Idiot box is an Idiot

[CatWoman]

Olbermann All Wet on Waterboarding

Keith Olbermann got a lot of attention for Monday night's "special comment" on waterboarding, in which he described the White House as "a criminal conspiracy to cover the ass of George W. Bush" and told the astonishing tale, first reported by ABC News last week, of former Department of Justice official Daniel Levin. Charged with rewriting the Administration's legal position on torture, Levin actually voluntarily underwent waterboarding in 2004 to better understand the procedure before assessing its legality. Here's what Olbermann said Levin concluded: "Waterboarding, he said, is torture. Legally it is torture. Practically it is torture. Ethically it is torture. And he wrote it down." Then he got fired, naturally.

It's stirring rhetoric from Olbermann, as usual—only it's almost certainly 100 percent not true!

According to the ABC News report Olbermann cited, Levin did not decide that waterboarding by the U.S. is torture; he just thought we were doing it wrong. "Levin, who refused to comment for this story, concluded waterboarding could be illegal torture unless performed in a highly limited way and with close supervision," wrote ABC News's Jan Crawford Greenburg and Ariane de Vogue (emphasis added). "And, sources told ABC News, he believed the Bush Administration had failed to offer clear guidelines for its use." In other words, the man whom Olbermann believes "should have a statue in his honor in Washington right now" for making a liar of Bush about torture apparently thinks that, in principle, waterboarding is perfectly legal.

Which makes him any different from Dick Cheney how, exactly?

http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2007/11/keith-olbermann-wrong-on-waterboarding-facts-daniel-levin.php

[zabet]

1. oh my...

:popcorn:

[cali]

2. uh oh.

did Olberman take dramatic license?

[Buzz Clik]

3. Well, ABC strikes again.

Another expert with even more direct experience on the technique labels waterboarding a torture with no qualifications.

Listen to this interview with Malcolm Nance: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15844677

Nobody -- absolutely noboby -- but the Bush administration thinks waterboarding is not torture. Except maybe ABC.

[Sparkly]

4. Then why did they oust him?

Levin was working on a second memo that would have imposed tighter controls on the use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding. While working on that memo, ABC reported “Levin was forced out of the Justice Department when Alberto Gonzales became Attorney General.”

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/11/03/waterboarding-abc-news-levin/ (<- his memo is linked here, at thinkprogress.)
http://www.abcnews.go.com/WN/DOJ/story?id=3814076&page=1

Maybe he was about to explain what he meant by a "highly limited way." He certainly didn't say that BushCo was doing anything in a "highly limited way."

[Buzz Clik]

5. As a follow-up to Nance's insistence that waterboarding is torture:

Is There a Place for the Waterboard?

Yes. The waterboard must go back to the realm of SERE training our operators, soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. We must now double our efforts to prepare for its inevitable and uncontrolled use of by our future enemies.

Until recently, only a few countries considered it effective. Now American use of the waterboard as an interrogation tool has assuredly guaranteed that our service members and agents who are captured or detained by future enemies will be subject to it as part of the most routine interrogations. Forget threats, poor food, the occasional face slap and sexual assaults. This was not a dignified ‘taking off the gloves’; this was descending to the level of our opposition in an equally brutish and ugly way. Waterboarding will be one our future enemy’s go-to techniques because we took the gloves off to brutal interrogation. Now our enemies will take the gloves off and thank us for it.

http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/10/waterboarding-is-torture-perio/

Nice thought, eh?

[Wiley50]

6. Never mistake a box for it's contents

TV could be so much better

in my dreams

[Buzz Clik]

7. It is outstanding, but you have to be selective.

I watched The Sixth Sense with my daughter last night and followed up with a dynamite football game between Central Michigan and Western Michigan... with the sound off.

I don't watch prime time network news. I don't watch Fox ever. Or the shopping networks.

There's good stuff out their. Just use your filters.