Bush's Feeble Torture Dodge

Here's video of Comedy Central's Jon Stewart bitterly playing the game: "Cruel, Inhuman, Degrading or O-Tay."

Stewart also shows White House homeland security adviser Fran Townsend telling CNN on Thursday: "We start with the least harsh measures first. It stops after -- if someone becomes cooperative." But as Stewart points out, that's not a refutation of torture. "That's how you do it. It wouldn't work the other way around."

And John Oliver explains administration policy to Stewart: "If we do do those things, they must not be torture."

Stewart: "So words, in and of themselves, have no value?"

Oliver: "Wow. Wow. I'd have thought you'd at least support our words, Jon. . . . Our brave, fighting words who've been serving this country since this war on terror began, many of them making the ultimate sacrifice: Losing their definitions.

"Words like torture, victory, surge, mission, accomplished. Once filled with purpose, now signifying nothing."

Wiretapping Watch

Eric Lichtblau and Carl Hulse write in the New York Times: "Two months after insisting that they would roll back broad eavesdropping powers won by the Bush administration, Democrats in Congress appear ready to make concessions that could extend some crucial powers given to the National Security Agency.

"Administration officials say they are confident they will win approval of the broadened authority that they secured temporarily in August as Congress rushed toward recess. Some Democratic officials concede that they may not come up with enough votes to stop approval.

"As the debate over the eavesdropping powers of the National Security Agency begins anew this week, the emerging measures reflect the reality confronting the Democrats.

"Although willing to oppose the White House on the Iraq war, they remain nervous that they will be called soft on terrorism if they insist on strict curbs on gathering intelligence."

But Glenn Greenwald blogs for Salon that the House bill, at least, "would compel the administration 'to reveal to Congress the details of all electronic surveillance conducted without court orders since Sept. 11, 2001, including the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program.' It would also require the maintenance of a data base to record the identities of all Americans whose conversations are surveilled. And it provides nothing at all in the way of amnesty or immunity for lawbreaking telecoms or administration officials. The bill introduced by House leadership is a bill the White House will never accept and would certainly veto, and it is vastly better -- in important ways -- than the atrocity they enacted in August."

Iraq Watch

Joshua Partlow writes in The Washington Post: "For much of this year, the U.S. military strategy in Iraq has sought to reduce violence so that politicians could bring about national reconciliation, but several top Iraqi leaders say they have lost faith in that broad goal.