Miami thinker lays out a tough argument on torture and the Bush administration

Michael Froomkin, law professor at the University of Miami, has been writing extremely pointedly on torture for quite a while, and his argument now is honed to perfection. It’s on his superb blog, discourse.net, and here’s the first paragraph:

An important part of the war crimes defense strategy employed by US torturers has been to plead advice of counsel. This modern version of the ‘just following orders’ defense has had two strands. Both are unraveling.

Read it and become wise. Takes only a few minutes. Are the judges listening?

Did you see that? – objections to the torture memo were suppressed. As in Watergate, it’s the coverup that is fatal.

I’m reading this after having had my poor brain assaulted by Sean Hannity and Oliver North this evening. It was, as usual, via the car radio and I was driving, so I made no notes, and what follows is mere paraphrasing. Hannity let convicted felon North rip with raving: That what Obama is doing will be the absolute end of the United States, that this will lead to the collapse of the intelligence services and the military, and all morale will crumble, and on and on.

Any wingnut listening out there must hear the trumpets calling: Rise up, take arms. Don’t they understand the drive of their words? Violence.

FL-18: Another reason to reject the incumbent and vote for Annette Taddeo

Michael Froomkin has posted on his superb blog, Discourse.net, a denunciation of Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and the Florida Republican Party for the slimy mailer going out to Congressional District 18. It accuses us Democrats of surrendering to terrorists -- what else do they have in their bag of dirty Republican tricks?!?

There's an image of the mailer at the link above to Discourse.net, and I'll encourage traffic thataway by not showing the rotten thing on this blog.

Though I also live in FL-18, this mailer hasn't hit me yet. But my dining table is starting to groan under the weight of the lies rolling in from Ros-Lehtinen's campaign. This weekend came one extolling her for "helping middle class home owners, improve our health care system, invest in alternative and efficient energy sources and facilitate an affordable college education for our youth." All the stuff she doesn't do.

And there's a photo of her with her family and the slogan, "Together we will make the necessary changes."

Y'all catch the "changes" that she's asserting? Beware, there's no mention of retiring her rubber stamp.

By contrast, mailers from Annette Taddeo are factual and persuasive. I can only hope that people have their minds open as they decide how to vote.