NOW THERE'S TORTURE AND THERE'S TORTURE... NOT THAT WE DO EITHER

If you weren't reassured yesterday when Bush declared that we don't torture no one, perhaps you can still be suckered by two declarations in tomorrow's NY Times, one from Miss Condi about keeping an eye and a firm grip on Bush's private Republican army, the mercenary criminal enterprise known as Blackwater, and then yet another declaration by the Liar-in-Chief that torture is not torture when Republicans do it to guys he decides are the bad guys. I guess he is the Decider and he gets to decide what is and what isn't torture (although numerous treaties legitimate presidents signed long before his cronies staged the coup that placed them in the White House kind of defined that stuff already). Sounds like a technicality someone at the Hague can try to sort out someday.

OK; I have a feeling that setting brutal, vicious, unaccountable, murdering mercenaries loose on a civilian population counts as a war crime. Should Condi hang? Don't ask me; I think every legislator in Congress who ever voted for any of their schemes is culpable. And the one who took impeachment off the table...

Anyway, Condi, on behalf of the Bush Regime, wants to keep Blackwater in Iraq, regardless of what Congress, too afraid to provoke a constitutional clash, thinks. So she says she'll keep an eye on them. Feel better? (Not so much; but I would if it was Naomi Wolf who was watching Blackwater.)

The department will also install video cameras in Blackwater armored vehicles to produce a record of all operations that could be used in investigations of the use of force by private security contractors. The State Department will also save recordings of all radio transmissions between Blackwater convoys and military and civilian agencies supervising them in Iraq.

...The State Department measures announced on Friday are the first concrete response by the American government to the violent episode on Sept. 16 in central Baghdad involving several Blackwater teams that left as many as 17 Iraqis dead. Officials said the State Department would send dozens of its diplomatic security service agents to Baghdad so that there would be enough people in place to accompany every Blackwater convoy.

The State Department was facing new questions on Friday about its handling of another case, involving a former Blackwater guard who is suspected of shooting a bodyguard to an Iraqi vice president while drunk last Christmas Eve.

The former guard, Andrew J. Moonen, now lives in Seattle after being dismissed from Blackwater and sent home from Iraq 36 hours after the shooting, with the approval and help of the State Department.

But within weeks of losing his job at Blackwater, Mr. Moonen was hired by a Defense Department contractor and sent to Kuwait to work on logistics related to the Iraq war, a spokesman for the contractor, Combat Support Associates, said Friday. Mr. Moonen worked for the company from February until August of this year, said the spokesman, Paul Gennaro.

Friday was a regular Regime propaganda offensive. At the same time Condi was promising to hold a tighter leash on those awful Blackwater murderers rascals, Bush was screeching, in defiance of common knowledge-- a trick he used to get away with more regularly-- that "This government does not torture." The frequency and intensity of his blatant lying almost qualifies. But not as much as waterboarding. And although treaties Bush has surely never read but by which he is bound stipulates that there are no exceptions to the thou shalt not torture rule, Bush says he can do whatever he wants.

“I have put this program in place for a reason, and that is to better protect the American people,” the president said, without mentioning the C.I.A. by name. “And when we find somebody who may have information regarding a potential attack on America, you bet we’re going to detain them, and you bet we’re going to question them, because the American people expect us to find out information-- actionable intelligence so we can help protect them. That’s our job.”

And rounding up random teenagers in Aghan marketplaces and dumping them into a cell for months and months... is that his job too? As for protecting the American people... well it's demonstrable and without contention that no one has ever done a worse job at that. No. One. Ever.

The he claimed he ran all this by the appropriate members of Congress and they agreed. They beg to differ. According to Senator Rockefeller, Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, "The administration can’t have it both ways. I’m tired of these games. They can’t say that Congress has been fully briefed while refusing to turn over key documents used to justify the legality of the program.”