What did he know and when did he know it? I'm serious. The guy wasn't confirmed to be a chessboard placeholder for the G.O.P. He was Attorney General of the United States.
Meanwhile, AS has this:
Cheney has all but declared that without torture, America cannot be safe. Gingrich is reiterating that. Rove tried to run the 2006 election on the question of who has the balls to torture terror suspects more brutally. Unless we have clear data that can judge these claims, we cannot dispositively prevent a recurrence.
Leaving aside how unhappy one ought to be about Danner's publication of an IRC report, I'm not sure we really, really, double really need to have data quite of this sort.
Did we really need to run an off-the-books "experiment" in torture to see what the data would turn up?
Did we really need to run an off-the-books "experiment" in torture to see what the data would turn up?Apart from evidence of criminal wrongdoing by Bush, the data is a nice-to-have, in terms of the 'debate'.
What's more, if there are programs to be run, like project Able Danger, that's when we might look at datasets, to some degree, to see if our massive $40+ billion, annual, fancy-classified-budget really has much merit. I suspect that most of these programs, even if they have positive 'data points', would get shut down on any kind of serious-going cost-benefit analysis.
