Fourth, legalizing torture in a genuine ticking-bomb situation is superfluous. If Charles Austin actually keeps L.A. from being nuked by torturing a guy, what jury is going to convict him, even if he cut off the subject's testicles to get him to talk?

That has always been my reaction to the "ticking time-bomb" hypothetical. If you are so sure of the immediate danger, and so sure that the suspect knows how to stop it, would breaking the law really be something that holds you back? If you could stop a nuke by robbing a liquor store, would you hesitate to do that? If you could stop a nuke by just killing the suspect, would you hesitate? No, so why would the fact that torture is illegal suddenly make you willing to allow a catastrophe instead of violate the law?

Arnone, torture is not a "tool" for obtaining valid intel. Its chief use has been to obtain false confessions -- to witchcraft, bourgeois deviationism, whatever.

Actually, Anderson, I'd go farther than that. Because of the incredibly dubious nature of any info obtained by torture, and the inherent brutality required to get anything at all, I would go so far as to state that torture is nothing more than an excuse to brutalize a powerless victim. It gives the torturer a chance to take sadistic revenge on some psychological surrogate for the person or group that truly threatens him, but provides exactly zero concrete benefit. Using it is, almost by definition, evidence of a deranged mind.

In light of the handling of the Chemerinsky hiring, there is only one conclusion. The University of California at Irvine clearly has misdirected its search efforts. It has been looking for a law school dean. But what it really needs......

And as the son of a convert from Islam, he ought to know what ex-Muslims face at the hands of the members of their former religion. One of the Church of England's most senior bishops is warning that people will......

Hey -- in a world where we are seeing women enter non-traditional fields more and more often, we knew there would be a day with a real possibility of a male "First Lady". I like Mitt Romney's response to it.......

everything is offensive to “adults with heightened sensitivities." Should Jews be thrown off planes because they're offensive to Muslim passengers?...

Arnone, torture is not a "tool" for obtaining valid intel. Its chief use has been to obtain false confessions -- to witchcraft, bourgeois deviationism, whatever.

The people who interrogate for a living and write the manuals on the subject, are as one in rejecting torture. There are better methods.

The toilet Paper sees signs of a split within the Bush administration on Iran policy and that language in the President’s speech on Thursday “reflected an intense and continuing struggle between factions within his administration over how aggressivel...

I've searched the blogroll and the media and come up with some great reading for EVERYBODY. Right, Left, Middle, Conspiracy, whatever ... there's something for you here: Cardinal shocks Germans with "Nazi" term, from A Western Heart “evil” gun ...