of Commander in Chief?  How?

I agree with those who think Obama should respond to Clinton's negative attacks by being forceful, but on policy grounds.  Here's a perfect opportunity to shame Clinton for saying only she and McCain are qualified to be Commander-in-Chief.  And, Obama should make McCain's vote against the bill (and his likely vote to sustain Bush's veto) the principal focus of the charge.  While I prefer immediate commencement of impeachment proceedings against Bush and Cheney, at the very least we should insist that the next President commits to ending the so-called harsh interrogation tactics.

Leslie Byrne is live blogging up a storm at firedoglake.  Howie Klein got her to support impeachment.

"Leslie, let me get the ball rolling with an easy one. Dennis Kucinich introduced a bill calling for the opening of an investigation into impeachment hearings on Cheney. Is that something you would co-sponsor if you were in Congress?

Yes. The wrongful acts of Bush must not be swept under the rug."

Does he agree that the use of waterboarding as a method of interrogation used against captured American soldiers (by any enemy) is acceptable?

And here is what a right wing website that rates all members of Congres on various issues said about the topic, which actually was a bit encouraging:

John McCain on Homeland Security  
Click here for 63 full quotes on Homeland Security OR 6 older headlines OR background on Homeland Security.
Waterboarding is torture; we're not going to torture people. (Nov 2007)
Waterboarding is torture; & as A.G., Mukasey will declare it. (Nov 2007)
Consult lawyers on war decisions; no half-cocked war basis. (Oct 2007)
Ran the largest squadron in the US Navy. (Oct 2007)
After 9/11, ask Americans to join military or AmeriCorps. (Oct 2007)
Let loose smart, tough spies to catch Bin Laden. (Oct 2007)
I've spent my life leading on national security issues. (Sep 2007)
Torture supported only by people without military experience. (Sep 2007)
Radical Islamic extremism is a hydra-headed challenge. (Aug 2007)
Torture is ineffective as interrogation & for world opinion. (May 2007)
Close Guantanamo Bay prison; announce no-torture policy. (Apr 2007)
Torture has never worked throughout history. (Apr 2007)
We must provide our children a strong, better country. (Aug 2004)
A lack of complacency shouldn't provoke a lack of confidence. (Aug 2004)
We don't have as much to fear as we had in the past. (Apr 2004)
Those who gave their lives deserve to be remembered. (Apr 2004)
"Rogue state rollback" avoids use of US troops. (Mar 2000)
Disagrees with Perot: No more POWs in Vietnam. (Feb 2000)
Accepts gays in military under current policy. (Jan 2000)
Military's political leaders need military backgrounds. (Jan 2000)
Women have proven themselves in combat-no restrictions. (Dec 1999)
Bombing useless targets in Vietnam destroyed US morale. (Nov 1999)
Vietnam was a worthy cause despite losing. (Nov 1999)
Pres. needs experience more than briefing books. (Sep 1999)
Discard ABM Treaty and develop a missile defense. (Apr 1999)
Use force, with US control, only for vital interests. (Apr 1999)
 

Here's a link to the website where that information came from:

http://www.ontheissues.org/Int...

I have to say folks, that while I don't support McCain for President, I am heartened by Barack Obama's words that we can ALL be thankful that George W. Bush won't be on the ballot in November....McCain's more moderate views on lots of issues is why many in the Right Wing can't stand him.  I for one am sleeping easier just knowing that.  While we may not agree with McCain on lots of things, he's certainly not as big of an idiot as George Bush "in my opinion".

McCain voted against the bill Bush vetoed and will undoubtedly vote to sustain Bush's veto.

McCain wants to have it both ways.  He can claim to be opposed to waterboarding and other coercive interrogation techniques, but he wants the CIA interrogation manual to not be limited like the Army manual which bans these techniques.

It is absolute baloney for Bush to claim that terrorists would be at any kind of advantage if they knew the CIA couldn't legally employ certain coercive interrogation techniques.  Beyond the ethics of using the techniques, reputable experts believe that humane techniques can yield not only more useful information, but also that the coercive techniques can cause those subject to them to tell interrogators whatever they think will make the pain stop, regardless of the truth of the information.

It is just not right to think that a President McCain would be acceptable, because he personally opposes the use of the coercive techniques.  No President should be given the power to authorize them.

Bush has taken too much power, and Congress has let him do so.  Beginning with the next President and the next Congress, we should insist on rolling back this imbalance.

I never said McCain was acceptable, just that he wasn't as big an idiot as Bush.  That Bush is a low threshold to beat is a restatement of the obvious.

Pru, I know I don't like to be flamed, and it seems like that's the way you took my comment.  I'm sorry about that.  I felt compelled to counter any impression your comment may have made on anyone that McCain's personal opposition to waterboarding was enough of a difference between him and Bush such that we should be complacent about the possibility of McCain becoming President.  In fact, that McCain has chosen to favor supporting Bush on this bill over McCain's prior stated opposition to waterboarding ought to make us question his commitment to that otherwise humane position.  Remember this is the same guy who denounced certain fundamentalist Christians as "agents of intolerance" in 2000 and now proudly stood with Hagee who is as intolerant as they come.

Is it true that the new copies of the movie GI Jane starring Demo Moore that came out a few years back where she is waterboarded in BUDs training has been edited/removed from new versions. I had heard that when aired on TV recently those scenes were removed but it is striking that when this movie was released there was not even a whiff of interest in this though it was rather disturbing to watch in the theater especially being done on a woman.

The real problem is that nobody knows if waterboarding will work or not work on a particular individual.  There seems to be significant evidence that it works for some and it doesn't work for others.  Thus the problem.  While the easy and politically correct answer is to NEVER condone any torture, it is not so easy when one considers the possibility that it might work to save lives.  Before you get your panties in a wad, consider this hypothetical: What if the 20th Hijacker arrested before 911 had been captured and waterboarded AND that waterboarding allowed Federal authorities to prevent the other 19 from boarding planes in Boston and the eventual death of 3,000 Americans in New York.  If presented with that hypothetical, I hope and believe that Obama AND Hillary AND any other reasonable person would unquestionably advocate waterboarding (a non-lethal) tactic.  To the extent that you would even consider answering this hypothetical in the negative, you have lost any sense of reality and judgment.

that's only because it requires one to study and reflect and not get swayed by the Bush Administration's hype aided and abetted by popular fiction like "24."

I urge everyone to read Scott Horton's blog, No Comment, at Harper's.

His post on March 1 on this topic is just the latest in a long series of important posts.

Here's an excerpt:

We should all be focused on the gap between reality and the world of "24." Here are the major points I would make:

• The irreality of the ticking-bomb. For one thing the fact that the ticking-bomb scenario upon which they build has never occurred in the entirety of human history. It's a malicious fiction. The facts posited will simply never occur. But beyond this, while we are asked to keep our eye on the ticking-bomb scenario, it has nothing to do with the cases in which highly coercive techniques are actually used-look at the testimony of Steven Bradbury before the Judiciary Committee. He cited three instances in which waterboarding, an iconic torture technique, was used. None of them involved the ticking-bomb or anything like it.

• The reliability of torture. The Intelligence Science Board looked at the question extensively and came to clear conclusions in December 2006. Torture does not work, they said. Indeed, one passage of their report was clearly a swipe at "24" which they said rested on a series of absurd premises. The belief that a person, once tortured, speaks the truth is ancient and very false. Torture, when applied, seems very likely to produce false intelligence upon which we rely to our own detriment. Ask Colin Powell. He delivered a key presentation to the Security Council in which he made the case for war against Iraq. The keystone of Powell's presentation turned on evidence taken from a man named al-Libi who was tortured and said that Iraq was busily at work on an WMD program. This information, of course, was totally wrong. Al-Libi fabricated it because he knew this is just what the interrogators wanted to hear, and by saying it, they would stop torturing. It was a perfect demonstration of the tendency of torture to contaminate the intelligence gathering process with bogus data.

• Containment. Can torture be introduced and used only in a highly limited set of cases, usually against cold-hearted terrorists, the worst of the worst? Is there not instead an inevitable rush to the bottom that results in any limitations being disregarded? The corrosive effects of culture on a society altogether.

• For another, the nation's reputation in the world. Generations of Americans have fought and sacrificed to build a system of alliances around the world that provide our security bulwark. What has happened to those alliances? In country after country-including many of the nations which have historically been our tightest allies-our government's approval level is, as now in Turkey, within the margin of error. That's right. The percentage approving may actually be zero. In nation after nation and even among our own allies, we are outstripped by the world's last Stalinist power, China. This is a very heavy price, and most of it has to do with torture policy. So torture policy erodes confidence of our community of allies in us, makes them hesitant to share intelligence, and to support us in counterterrorism and other operations. I have studied in some detail the consequences of U.S. torture policies for operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, where it is clear that allies are dropping out and loosing enthusiasm for supporting operations, and torture policies provide the single most important motivator in this process.

• Damage to military morale and discipline. George Washington was famous for his opposition to torture. He came to his views not for idealistic but for practical reasons. During the French and Indian Wars he observed brutal tactics being used in the wilderness, and he saw that the soldiers who used them were bad soldiers-disorderly, poorly disciplined, impossible to control. He concluded that torture destroyed morale and discipline. And that continues to be the accepted wisdom of the military today, and the force behind the historically unprecedented opposition of military leaders to Bush Administration policy that we saw in the winter of 2006-07. The dean of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, BG Patrick Finnegan, visited the writers of "24" to present a complaint. This program was actually corrupting military intelligence and discipline. Soldiers in the field reach to the techniques employed by Jack Bauer-if he can't use them, why can't we?

• And the weightiest link in this chain tied around our national neck should be considered last. As my friend Mark Danner writes, if you assembled a team of Madison Avenue's most brilliant thinkers in a room and asked them to concoct a recruitment plan for al Qaeda and its allies, we'd never come anywhere close to the one that the Bush Administration delivered up to them with the torture program. It's the major reason why today, six years after the start of the war on terror, the National Intelligence Estimate tells us that al Qaeda is back up or has exceeded the strength it had on 9/11, and the Taliban has also been able to regroup and recharge, destabilizing a friendly government in Afghanistan.

because it relies on 20/20 hindsight.  Essentially you're saying that if we tortured a hijacker we'd have uncovered the whole plot.  This may be true (depending on the questionable reliability of torture), but how did we know that person was a hijacker in the first place?  

In other words, if we captured 50 questionable people today, which ones should we waterboard to find out about the next 9/11 plot?  

Furthermore, what is the threshold for allowing torture?  Sure, most people wouldn't question torturing a person or three in order to stop the deaths of 3000 Americans.  But what about a smaller attack - say 20 people killed?  Or 3 dead?  What if it were only a financially expensive attack (i.e. they destroy infrastructure but hurt no people)?  Is there a limit we should put on when to torture to save lives/property?  And if so, how could we possibly know the damage before we actually torture them to find out the plot?

And if you're worried about saving lives, terrorists aren't the only ones you need to worry about.  Drunk drivers kill many more Americans every year (actually, I think the time frame is about every quarter) than the 9/11 attacks did.  Should we start waterboarding every bar patron to find out if they drive drunk on a regular basis?  As bad as that sounds, I'm sure we'd save many American lives if we did it.

So yes, you're right, it isn't an easy issue either way.

is any official policy of torture, however you care to define torture, and whatever nomenclature is chosen to obscure the fact, such as "extreme interrogation measures" or what have you.  

The only reason we are having this discussion is because  George W. Bush is a sociopathic personality. He is full of himself, stuffed with the arrogance of power, and he basically has no, repeat no, empathy with fellow human beings, and not a scrap of understanding of the historical imperatives which caused Americans to revolt against the British monarch and the English aristocracy, and the Old World system, period. That his is the face of my America to the world is infuriating. Telling me waterboarding is "not torture," or that what the enemy does is far worse is irrelevant.  What are we fighting for, anyway---- to become like the enemy?

I noticed Mr. Bush made some smart-ass references to exact situations in which terror attacks were avoided because, presumably, of "extreme measures" of interrogation. Given the little liar's track record, I simply do not believe his examples; undoubtedly there is more (or, maybe, less) to his story than he allows.  I agree with the military in their refusal to engage in torture in the field, and their insistance that more and better intelligence can readily be obtained in a timely manner by ethical treatment of prisoners... not to mention that torturing our captives places our own troops in increasing danger of torture themselves.    

Whatever happened to Honor? Trust? No wonder our erstwhile allies edge away from us.