Exposing Bush's Weakness

On Waterboarding

Jan Crawford Greenburg and Arian de Vogue reported for ABC News last week: "A senior Justice Department official, charged with reworking the administration's legal position on torture in 2004 became so concerned about the controversial interrogation technique of waterboarding that he decided to experience it firsthand, sources told ABC News.

"Daniel Levin, then acting assistant attorney general, went to a military base near Washington and underwent the procedure to inform his analysis of different interrogation techniques.

"After the experience, Levin told White House officials that even though he knew he wouldn't die, he found the experience terrifying and thought that it clearly simulated drowning.

"Levin, who refused to comment for this story, concluded waterboarding could be illegal torture unless performed in a highly limited way and with close supervision. And, sources told ABC News, he believed the Bush Administration had failed to offer clear guidelines for its use."

What happened then? "Sources said he was forced out of the Justice Department when [Alberto] Gonzales became attorney general."

The Washington Post editorial board writes of Levin that "his name can be added to the roster of accomplished conservative lawyers, including former deputy attorney general James B. Comey and former Office of Legal Counsel chief Jack L. Goldsmith, who found themselves fighting to sustain the rule of law in an administration too often eager to suspend it."

Olbermann Watch

And the Levin story set off MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, who had this to say during his "special comment" last night: "It is a fact startling in its cynical simplicity and it requires cynical and simple words to be properly expressed: The presidency of George W. Bush has now devolved into a criminal conspiracy to cover the ass of George W. Bush.

"All the petulancy, all the childish threats, all the blank-stare stupidity; all the invocations of World War III, all the sophistic questions about which terrorist attacks we wanted him not to stop, all the phony secrets; all the claims of executive privilege, all the stumbling tap-dancing of his nominees, all the verbal flatulence of his apologists. . . .

"All of it is now, after one revelation last week, transparently clear for what it is: the pathetic and desperate manipulation of the government, the refocusing of our entire nation, toward keeping this mock president and this unstable vice president and this departed wildly self-overrating attorney general, and the others, from potential prosecution for having approved or ordered the illegal torture of prisoners being held in the name of this country."

Olbermann also suggest one possible motivation for torture: "Study after study for generation after generation has confirmed that torture gets people to talk, torture gets people to plead, torture gets people to break, but torture does not get them to tell the truth.

"Of course, Mr. Bush, this isn't a problem if you don't care if the terrorist plots they tell you about are the truth or just something to stop the tormentors from drowning them.

"If, say, a president simply needed a constant supply of terrorist threats to keep a country scared."