I said I would be furious if this happened

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/12/08/MN061AVC89.DTL
And I am. Wanna bet that a few unlucky underlings will now be fed into the criminal justice system for doing what this bastard had advised they should do?
EDITED IN: Of course, if he gets away with it, what about those further up the chain of command who authorized it? The highest placed person whose fingerprints are on the decision to use torture is former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. Years ago, I made an unserious entry comparing her to Henry Kissinger; to which someone replied, equally in jest, to ask whether this meant she was a war criminal. Alas, we were both more in the right than we imagined.

When even Ann Coulter is right

I have had a thing or two to say about Ann Coulter in the past, little of it sympathetic. But in this case, http://townhall.com/columnists/AnnCoulter/2009/12/09/martha_coakley_too_immoral_for_teddy_kennedys_seat?page=full&comments=true&sort=asc#comments , she is absolutely right, probably more right than she knows. When I heard Martha Coakley's name mentioned, I knew it sounded familiar; and suddenly I remembered that she was the prosecutor in the case of a British nanny who was convicted of murdering a baby in a "shaken baby syndrome" trial some ten years ago - a case that had made me boil with indignation. You may remember that "shaken baby syndrome", was the be-afraid-be-very-afraid child-related horror du jour, having replaced - what else - satanic abuse in that role. Since then it has been largely discredited, but at the time several people on both sides of the Atlantic were charged and sometimes convicted on the flimsiest of evidence. The reasoning seemed to be: "Here is a dead baby - someone must be responsible for it!" One detail from Coakley's case is burned in my memory. According to the prosecution so-called experts, the baby had suffered injuries "comparable to being hit by a train". The notion of a young woman, an ordinary young woman mind you, not only shaking a baby for minutes at a time, but doing so - shaking, mind you; not smashing against the wall or throwing on the floor, just shaking - "with enough strength to be comparable to being struck by a train"; where on the face of God's green Earth did they find twelve men and women to believe such an enormity? The jury ignored the defence experts, who showed that the so-called injuries were consistent with a rare but well documented syndrome where the plates of a baby's skull fail to stick together, and convicted the girl of murder. I said at the time that we should hear from Coakley again, in elected office, and I was right. One detail: the alternate jurors, who had been listening to the whole trial from a neighbouring room, were so furious at the verdict that they trashed the furniture.

Evidently, Martha Coakley makes a habit of seizing on false prosecutions based on popular but ill-grounded terrors to advance her career. Just the type the good people of Massachusetts want to represent their interests and values in the Senate of the nation.