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fantasyman .....

President George Bush cited the London July 7 bombings in an interview broadcast last night to justify his support for waterboarding, an interrogation technique widely regarded as torture. 

In an interview with the BBC he said information obtained from alleged terrorists helped save lives, and the families of the July 7 victims would understand that. Bush said waterboarding, which simulates drowning, was not torture and is threatening to veto a congressional bill that would ban it. 

London Bombs Justify 'Torture', Says Bush 

meanwhile …..

A senior official in the Bush justice department said for the first time today that the controversial interrogation tactic is currently illegal. 

The waterboarding remarks by Stephen Bradbury, head of the justice department office of legal counsel, caused a stir in America because they go further than more uncertain opinions on the legality of the tactic voiced by the CIA director and attorney general.

US Official Admits Waterboarding Presently Illegal 

and, of course …..

The timing of the Pentagon's announcement it will prosecute six Guantánamo inmates is notable: is it changing its definition of torture? 

The Pentagon's decision to press charges against six Guantánamo detainees in connection with the 9/11 attacks has provided the US administration with its first positive publicity, in connection with the prison, for many long years. 

In many ways, this is as it should be. Since October 2002, when the first prisoners were freed, the steady release of hundreds of innocent men, captured by mistake or sold to the US military for bounty payments, and of Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war in Afghanistan that began long before 9/11, has served only to create the impression that the prison has been a miscarriage of justice on a colossal scale, with little, if any relation to the events of 9/11. 

However, as Victoria Brittain pointed out in these pages yesterday, there are doubts that any of these men will receive a fair trial. One of them, Mohammed al-Qahtani, was subjected to brutal interrogations in Guantánamo, which were made public in 2005, and the other five - including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who confessed in a military tribunal last year that he was 'responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z' - were held for three to four years in secret prisons run by the CIA, where coercive interrogations were widely practiced. 

Torture On Trial

Huzaifa Parhat

Free This Detainee

By Ruth Marcus
Wednesday, July 9, 2008; A15

There's someone I'd like to introduce to President Bush. Also to Chief Justice John Roberts and Sen. John McCain. His name is Huzaifa Parhat, and that get-together might be tricky to arrange. Parhat is also known as ISN (Internment Serial Number) 320 at Guantanamo Bay.

Parhat is Uighur, a Muslim ethnic minority group from western China. He fled China for Afghanistan, and, when the camp he was living in there was bombed by U.S. forces, went to Pakistan. For a bounty, Parhat was turned over to U.S. authorities and shipped to Guantanamo.

He has been held as an enemy combatant for more than six years -- even though the government concedes he was never a member of the Taliban or al-Qaeda and never took part in any hostilities against the United States.

Indeed, Parhat's detention is based on evidence so flimsy that a federal appeals court here told the government it had to free Parhat or come up with something more.

The ruling was remarkable because its author, Clinton appointee Merrick Garland, was joined by two conservatives, Reagan appointee David Sentelle and George W. Bush appointee Thomas Griffith. It was remarkable, too, as the product of a system stacked against alleged enemy combatants -- so stacked that the Supreme Court recently declared it an inadequate substitute for full court review.

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See the stupid sadist Bushit in the toon at top 

drowning, not waving...

From the New York Times

Waterboarding Used 266 Times on 2 Suspects

By SCOTT SHANE

C.I.A. interrogators used waterboarding, the near-drowning technique that top Obama administration officials have described as illegal torture, 266 times on two key prisoners from Al Qaeda, far more than had been previously reported.

The C.I.A. officers used waterboarding at least 83 times in August 2002 against Abu Zubaydah, according to a 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum. Abu Zubaydah has been described as a Qaeda operative.

A former C.I.A. officer, John Kiriakou, told ABC News and other news media organizations in 2007 that Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew.

The 2005 memo also says that the C.I.A. used waterboarding 183 times in March 2003 against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The New York Times reported in 2007 that Mr. Mohammed had been barraged more than 100 times with harsh interrogation methods, causing C.I.A. officers to worry that they might have crossed legal limits and to halt his questioning. But the precise number and the exact nature of the interrogation method was not previously known.

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see toon at top...