"In the end, [stopping additional US torture] may be more important than punishing those who acted wrongly in pursuit of what they thought was right."
Groucho Marx was interviewing a woman who had 18 children.
Groucho said, 'That's a big responsibility. Why so many children?'
The woman replied, 'Well, I just love my husband.'
Said, Groucho: 'Well, I love my cigar, but I take it out of my mouth every once in a while.'
According to a story on TheAtlantic.com, journalist Patrick Tyler’s forthcoming book, A World of Trouble, includes a scene where Tenet is drinking copious amounts of scotch in the pool of a Saudi prince. Drunk and on sleeping pills, Tenet allegedly proceeds to rave about the Bush administrations attempts to pin Iraq’s missing weapons of mass destruction on him.
The December 16 story includes two passages from Tyler’s book.
A servant appeared with a bottle. Tenet knocked back some of the scotch. Then some more. They watched with concern. He drained half the bottle in a few minutes.
“They’re setting me up. The bastards are setting me up,” Tenet said, but “I am not going to take the hit.”
" U.S. law enforcement agencies have arrested 61 people and rescued 11 children as part of the larger takedown of a far-reaching global child pornography ring, Attorney General Michael Mukasey announced Friday.
Mukasey said the international law enforcement effort started after a "horrible" discovery in 2006: Australian authorities discovered a child abuse video depicting a father who had been "sexually abusing his young daughters and producing images of that abuse."
The video had been widely distributed online in closed Internet forums and servers that authorities discovered.
Authorities arrested the father, identified only as a Belgian national, about a month after the discovery of the video.
The man allegedly had large amounts of child pornography in his possession, and had allegedly enlisted the services of an Italian photographer whom officials said documented the sexual abuse and added the documentation to as many as seven Web sites.
"Every time Obama takes even more counsel from wingnuts, don't you feel the earth move in the scintillating "Team of Rivals" way that's got the Village all a-twitter?
Ooh, ahhh, just a little more to the right. OOOOOHHHH! YES! YES! YES!"
On a scorching morning earlier this year, Talib Mohammed Farkhan, who had been imprisoned for 15 months, shuffled into Hearing Room 3 to hear his U.S. captors explain the allegations against him for the first time.
Farkhan, a Shiite Muslim, appeared to follow along as the American officers said he had been detained for membership in the Mahdi Army, the anti-American Shiite militia. But he looked totally baffled when they also accused him of working with al-Qaeda in Iraq, the extremist Sunni Muslim group that kills Americans and Shiites.
"I don't understand how that could be possible," said a visibly flustered Farkhan, a welder from the southern city of Iskandariyah, who denied all the accusations. "They are Sunni. I am Shia."
Yet the three U.S. servicemen before him, a panel of non-lawyers convened as part of a new quasi-judicial process to review each detainee's case every six months, did not need to decide whether Farkhan had violated the law. Their task was to decide whether he posed an "imperative security threat" to the U.S.-led coalition or the Iraqi people. And they concluded that credible evidence, which they would not describe to Farkhan or a Washington Post correspondent allowed to view the 19-minute hearing, suggested that he probably did.
"I'm not looking at whether they are guilty or innocent," said Air Force Maj. Jeff Ghiglieri, the president of the review board that convened in May. "We're trying to determine as best we can whether they will do bad things if we release them."
