That great moment of jurisprudence was brought to you by Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit. He was referring to allegations that the Bush Obama  (sorry, they look so much alike..) administration is using threats of National Security to conceal crimes committed by the CIA as part of the extreme rendition program. This suit has been in and out of courts, and was only recently revived on appeal.

Interestingly, the administration plans to try the 9/11 plotters in open court using many of the same facts, and has talked about torture in the past. So, what made this so much more top secret?

How much longer is Obama going to talk about how different he is than Bush, while keeping many of the policies and sense of Imperial presidency that were Shrub's hallmarks?

I also find Judge Kozinski's attitude (as demonstrated by the quote in the title) that the administration should decide what is secret a little scary. Isn't the whole point of Judicial Review to keep the government from doing just that?

Mr. Hitchens was not tortured, as justice might suggest, for certain of his writings, or even for bogarting the Ketel One without putting a new bottle into the freezer. Rather, he willingly submitted to waterboarding in order to write about it.

His account is somewhat more colorful than that of my former colleague Dan Levin about the same experience. Dan is somewhat more . . . reserved than Hitchens.

Read it all, as they say. And prepare for the onslaught of ridicule about Hitchens and for the claims that waterboarding is nothing but the sort of frat prank you might experience at the water park.

It has insensitive ethnic connotations. Let's call it "waterboarding."

And while we're at it, let's at least retitle “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance” to something that sounds more modern. Maybe "Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape."

We wouldn't want anyone to call us plagiarists after all.

Via