erratica

This has to be one of the funniest presidential episodes I’ve seen in a number of years. During Bush’s farewell visit to Iraq, an angry (pissed-off is more accurate) Iraqi threw what I imagine were his shoes right at the president’s face! The Iraqi has to be given credit on two counts, a great arm – pitched both shoes straight to the face- and for having some big cojones -it takes some nerve attempting to do something to the president of the country that is occupying yours… remember Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo?
I also have to give credit to Bush’s reflexes though, he ducked those shoes as if hiding is all he’s ever done in his life.

Read the CNN article and and watch the video here.

John Ashcroft defended yesterday waterboarding as not constituting torture before a House panel. There were of course some very valuable pearls dropped in there:

The reports that I have heard, and I have no reason to disbelieve them, indicate that they were very valuable,” Ashcroft said, adding that CIA Director George Tenet indicated the “value of the information received from the use of enhanced interrogation techniques — I don’t know whether he was saying waterboarding or not, but assume that he was for a moment — the value of that information exceeded the value of information that was received from all other sources.”

“I believe a report of waterboarding would be serious, but I do not believe it would define torture,” Ashcroft said, responding to questions from Rep. Maxine Waters, D-California.

Can someone remind John Ashcroft of a little piece of history:

In the war crimes tribunals that followed Japan’s defeat in World War II, the issue of waterboarding was sometimes raised. In 1947, the U.S. charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for waterboarding a U.S. civilian. Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor.

On Jan. 21, 1968, The Washington Post ran a front-page photo of a U.S. soldier supervising the waterboarding of a captured North Vietnamese soldier. The caption said the technique induced “a flooding sense of suffocation and drowning, meant to make him talk.” The picture led to an Army investigation and, two months later, the court martial of the soldier.

Read the CNN article on Ashcroft’s nonsense here and the quotes following here , from an NPR note. Don’t miss the account at the end of the article on what it actually feels like.