Surf's up, let's go waterboarding! After we salute the moxie of Sens. Warner, Graham and McCain (Nikita Khrushchev would've understood)

Masters of "compromise": Bushstooge Rep. Duncan Hunter with Sens. John McCain and John Warner (and Sen. Lindsey Graham in back)

I keep wondering, wouldn't Chimpy the Prez and Dick the Veep and our Rummy speak more credibly about torture if they'd all been through a "full Guantanamo"?

So I was reading Howie's recent note on waterboarding earlier, and I kept thinking: Doesn't waterboarding always sound like something fun to try on a surfy beach?

So now I'm thinking, when it comes to all the torture fans with which this administration seems to be overstuffed, wouldn't it be appropriate--as well as fun--if each and every one of them had to undergo what I like to think of as "a full Guantanamo" before opening his piehole again on the subject.

I suppose, actually, I don't mean necessarily what's been going on at Guantanamo, althouth I'm not so sure that any limits on interrogation practices have been observed there either. But what I really have in mind is what we have reason to believe has been going on in our CIA "black hole" prisons, not to mention in the torture . . . er, interrogation chambers of the foreign intelligence services to which we've extremely renditioned prisoners we really wanted to have fun with . . . er, to give a hard time.

Not that our government owns up to having actually done, or sactioned, any really bad things, of course. We don't torture. Nuh-uh. And we have the word of such honest, upstanding citizens as Chimpy the Prez and AG Al "The Torture Guy" Gonzales.

At the same time, to judge by the great "compromise" hammered out between the warring Republican factions regarding the detention and trial of our detainees, even though the U.S. of A. would never do anything really naughty, it's apparently necesssary for us to: (1) trash the Geneva Conventions, (2) de-delegalize an assortment of things that we would never do (and that we can't specify anyway), and (3) immunize all our torture-mongerers . . . er, agents against all these naughty things that they, er, haven't done, ever. Honest!

Still and all, I might be more inclined to assign some seriousness to the views on torture of Chimpy the Prez and Dick the Veep and our Rummy if they could produce certificates showing that they'd been "given the works" by, say, one of Syria's Finest.

By the way, do you suppose those "heroic" senators--Warner, Graham and McCain--who forced the Administration to "compromise" on these great principles of military justice are feeling as to-the-core humiliated as they have every reason to be after the pathetic show of make-believe courage they just put on? Surely they must know that what they accomplished is a "compromise" that basically gives the deranged thugs running this administration everything they could have wanted. Do the heroic threesome know the depth of the shame they brought on themselves?

Well, maybe you can't really be ashamed if people are so stupid, they don't know you behaved shamefully, and think that you actually showed some guts. The result is sort of a giant bonfire in which we incinerate some of our bedrock principles, including some even more central to who we are than the Geneva Conventions.

If you think of the right of habeas corpus as just some abstraction or legal technicality, I urge you to read the really sensational piece Thom Hartmann posted a couple of days ago--explaining the principle, showing how deep it runs in our system of government (tracing back to the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215), and documenting how rigorously it has been upheld in U.S. history.

Even in the cases when habeas corpus has been suspended, the suspension was done with appreciation of the gravity of the undertaking and with at least some respect for the principles and procedures set out in the Constitution. It was never questioned, for example, that suspending habeas corpus requires the permission of Congress.

Now along comes this band of terrorist thugs and psychopaths, who should be rotting in prison somewhere but instead derive apparently instead-of-sexual thrills by throwing their weight around as the most powerful men on the planet. They flick away our bedrock principles as if they were specks of feces, tightening their dictatorial grip in the name of "freedom."

Hartmann concludes his piece with a story too good to pass up:

When I was working in Russia some years ago, a friend in Kaliningrad told me a perhaps apocryphal story about Nikita Khrushchev, who, following Stalin's death, gave a speech to the Politburo denouncing Stalin's policies of imprisoning people without trial. A few minutes into Khrushchev's diatribe, somebody shouted out, "Why didn't you challenge him then, the way you are now?"

The room fell silent, as Khrushchev swept the audience with his eyes. "Who said that?" he asked in a reasoned voice. Silence.

"Who said that?" Khrushchev demanded angrily, leaning forward. Silence.

Pounding his fist on the podium to accent each word, he thundered, "Who - said - that?" Still no answer.

Finally, after a long and strained silence, the elected politicians in the room fearful to even cough, a corner of Khrushchev's mouth lifted into a smile.

"Now you know," he said with a chuckle, "why I did not speak up against Stalin when I sat where you now sit."

Apparently Senators Graham, Warner, and McCain have about as much spine as did the members of Khrushchev's Politburo. One wonders what sort of Stalin-like threats Bush made to get them to so completely compromise their principles and betray the trust of their country.