Demosophia

OK, So I Was Born Yesterday

Honestly, I'm so naive. I figured the story about the Downing Street Memos that fueled the make-believe Conyers hearings was just another in the long list of controversies over interpretation that plague the ideological divide, like the fracas over "imminent threat." It really never entered my head that the memos are actually no more real than the Rathergate fakes. What's a creative new word for "surprised," now that Sullivan has violated the term "gobsmacked?" Yeah I'm that, and then some.

Update:

Captain Ed has more.

David Kopel has some sobering and valid thoughts about the Durban fiasco, comparing Gitmo to the UK detention of IRA prisoners which was deemed "inhuman and degrading" (but not "torture") by the European Court of Human Rights:

The European convention obviously does not apply to the American interrogation of Arab or Afghan terrorist suspects at a military base in Cuba, but there are still plausible objections that can be raised against coercive interrogations, even when the persons being interrogated are terrorists. Serious discussion about Guanatamo would be enhanced by looking to appropriate historical analogies (such as the U.K.'s self-defense in the 1970s against the I.R.A.), rather than to absurd analogies, such as those drawn by Senator Durbin, which trivialize the Holocaust, the Soviet genocide, and the Pol Pot genocide.