An interesting exchange between Jack Cafferty and Rachel Marsden occurred on CNN yesterday while discussing Bush’s new AG pick, Mukasey. Cafferty blasted Alberto Gonzalez over his role in dismantling our rule of law, including torture/waterboarding–here’s what they said:
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Cafferty: I think he’s trying to tread a minefield that was laid down for him by that sycophantic little yes-weasle Alberto Gonzalez. He, who wrote the memos in secret saying the Geneva Conventions didn’t apply to American when it came to enemy combatants, who wrote secret memos saying the President of the US didn’t have to obey the FISA court laws when it came to spying on Americans. That kind of subterfuge of the American rule of law is an entirely separate issue from whether or not waterboarding is torture or whether or nor surveillance under these conditions or those conditions is a good idea.
And now Mr Mukasey can’t say whether waterboarding is torture cause if he does, liability suddenly accrues for a whole lot of folks and who knows what the consequences are. Meanwhile, Gonzalez is wondering around happy as a clam. he out to be in jail for what he did. He didn’t answer questions on Capitol hill, he didn’t cooperate with the subpoenas, he couldn’t remember anything when he was asked. And then he’s allowed to resign and walk into the sunshine…
Mardsen: Well I think we do have to define torture. One man’s torture is another man’s CIA’s sponsored swim lesson.
A swim lesson? OK, I had to find out about this Republican talker because she’s obviously a bit off. And as we know, there is no such thing as a person being “too far right” in our media. Well. well. well…Why is CNN using a stalker? You see, as I googled Rachel Mardsen, I found some very interesting info on her. And here.
She was also escorted out of FOX:
SECURITY officers hastily escorted “Red Eye” contributor Rachel Marsden out of Fox News Channel’s Midtown headquarters yesterday for bizarre and erratic behavior. “She’s out of her [bleeping] mind. She was doing crazy stuff,” a spy told us…
The 28–year–old woman who falsely accused a swim coach at Simon Fraser University of sexual harassment in the mid 1990s, now faces a charge of criminal harassment.
Rachel Marsden was arrested by Vancouver Police after a 52–year–old Vancouver man complained of being harassed by phone and e-mail. Police say the two had an intimate on–again, off–again relationship over the past 12 months.
But Constable Sarah Bloor says Marsden began making threatening phone calls and e-mails to the man between October 7 and November 12 of this year.
Marsden was held in custody overnight.
Rebecca Traister of Salon has a three page profile about her on Salon. From all the reports I’d have to deduce that she’s one crazy gal and I have to ask CNN once again–why was she on The Situation Room?
Filed Under: Alberto Gonzales, Jack Cafferty, Right Wing Pundits, Torture, Wingnuts
Tags: AG, Alberto Gonzalez, Cafferty, Torture
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Shout it from the highest mountain !
We need a new rule: No more calling it “waterboarding.” Waterboarding sounds like a carnival ride. Call it what it is: drowning torture.
Maybe that hack Glen Beck wasn’t available to make a mockery of the legal system.
One man’s torture is another man’s CIA-sponsored swim lesson? Do those come with CIA-sponsored water wings?
I don’t care about her history of stalking. It’s an ad hominen attack that has nothing to do with her politics, which so weak that an attack on her character would be like Mike Tyson punching DJ Qualls. Why not just note that she has no idea how referring to torture victims as “enemy combatants” instead of “prisoners of war” is a horrible use of semantics in order to legally sidestep the immoral actions of our government.
Why doesn’t she volunteer to take one of those swimming lessons to prove her point? What a loose cannon. She belongs in a padded room.
How on earth do these ‘pundits’ continue to get airtime and paychecks? Great research. It was easy using teh google.
1, she needs to take a dive in from the deep end!
So according to this Twat, we need to sit down and define every little dirty trick the Republicans dream up and whether or not it’s torture in order to know what torture is?
In that case, I say we make the Republican conservatives sit down and define exactly what ‘offensive’ is. Every possible situation on Tv where someone is going to be offended by say, pornography, or nudity or necrophilia.
You’re talking about defining something that is hugely encompassing but is also common sense ya dumb bitch! I don’t need to write it down that slamming your fingers in a car door over and over again is torture for it to be torture.
How about all you rejects who are in favor of waterboarding go take a swim in the CIA pool and see how you like it?
There seems to be an endless stream of these reichwing zombies, doesn’t it?!!!
Another good way to define it is this:
If a nation of brown people were doing it to our troops/Christians/Republicans would you support it? Or would you start screaming to invade?
If you wouldn’t want someone doing it to you, then you shouldn’t be doing it to them. How freaking hard is that to understand?
Torture is torture and it’s not a CIA Sponsored Swim Lesson just because our side is the one doing it.
ahhhhhhhhhhggggggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrhhhhhhhh
when will the madness cease!?
the same shit every day.
I’m so tired of reading this stuff
what a mess
an embarrassment
maybe we ought to test water boarding on every person who suggests it is not torture
Calling this version of torture “waterboarding” is like referring to one being put on the rack as a “chiropractic adjustment”.
While we’re at it, we could also redefine “manicure” and “dentistry”.
Perhaps Rachel thinks one woman’s sexual harassment is one man’s flirting as well…not !
She certainly doesn’t like it when the shoe was on the other foot. She is one sick little piddle puppy.
I guess someone should tell the first american who is water-boarded by this administration or american soldier by an enemy it is a swim lesson.
Maybe stalking a swim coach teaches someone a lot about CIA swim lessons. Sounds to me like she held her breath underwater just a little too long.
Someone tell me why as a nation we have to torture now facing terrorism, but when facing the soviets who really could have destroyed america, we fought against it?
Republicans are fearful sheep.
A CIA-sponsored swim lesson! What a card! How provocative!
For fuck’s sake, why is anything any wingnut says “provocative” at worst, when we’re all supposed to be so dangerous?
As for her personal history, I’d like to say it’s irrelevant, but the news networks set this bar themselves with Scott Ritter.
Go back to Canada you ditz, we don’t need you coming down
here and adding to the heap of shit that has already piled up
since January 2000. America has plenty of it’s own conservative
braindead asshats, thank you very much!
In her “swimming lessons” they hold you under the water until you start to breath the water, then they might let you up. She is swimming in shit right now, Cat-out-of-bag and all.
She’s too wacked for Fox? That’s about as hard to do as putting a camel through an eye of a needle.
CNN is stoopid.
But the thugs have to cull every mental ward, bunko artist, and brothel to find people of this caliber to represent them. W keeps saying “It’s hard work.” Apparentleeee.
Dana @ 19:
She’s all yours!
We don’t want her back, and after all, she seems to be more “American” than Canadian, anyway.
Oh, man………….how sweet it is!!! I have often thought that as a last resort, bushco has been hiring fairly attractive female talking heads to help spread the evil……..Dana Perino also comes to mind. Wonder is she is a whack job, too. Uh, yeah, she’s a chronic liar.
Question is, why would Cafferty even bother talking to a nutjob like that, as you pointed out.
As the Canadian widow, living in Vancouver, of an American who was tortured by the North Vietnamese during Vietnam, I don’t know what to say, except I want Miss Marsden to look me in the eye and tell me my husband wasn’t tortured and didn’t suffer from his injuries for over thirty years.
She is reprehensible.
Torture is ALWAYS wrong, no matter who is doing it to whom.
For Dan,
Heather
I still don’t comprehend why these morons think they are so morally righteous that if someone else commits such an act it is heinous and must be punished, but when WE do it it’s justifiable. And yet these are the same people who jump around saying that morality is not open to interpretation when it comes to abortion, gay rights, etc, and that God knows better than any human EVER could. I’m so damn tired of these double standards. Torture is wrong, murder (deliberate unprovoked killing if they want a definition for THAT) is wrong, doing anything to harm other people when your life and the lives of others are not in danger from THAT individual is WRONG.
And by the way: we can call what they do to innocents “torture,” but I’m sure that they refer to it as something very similar to “CIA sponsered swim lessons.”
Its bitterly ironic that many of those on the right believe in moral absolutism about abortion and homosexuals, but when it comes to torture, its all “grey and relative.” They attack “moral relativism” except when they engage in it themselves…
The problem is we all have ‘incompetence fatigue’ from 7 years of this corruption laden administration. By the time you get pissed off finding out all the sordid details of one scandal, there are three others…..(WMD, Abu Gharib, Guantanamo, Gonzales, firing of attorneys, Plamegate, cronyism, Schiavo, wiretapping, energy task force, mission accomplished, and on and on and on….oh yeah…stealing the election, too!
George Arndt @ 27:
Kinda like the fundies who say that the Bible HAS to be taken literally, but then turn into literary figurativists when seeking the “signs” of the Apocalypse as stated in Revelation.
Jack Cafferty did not help matters when he proclaimed that he did not care if prisoners held by the U.S. were lined up against a wall and shot. Apparently things like habeas corpus and conducting trials to determine a person’s guilt or innocence are considered too quaint for conservatives like Cafferty and Ms. Mardsen. Another example of American Exceptionalism at its finest [or worst].
MUKASEY DRAWS A ‘LINE IN THE SAND’ ON WATERBOARDING
when are you americans going to wake up and realize that you are listening to CRAZy people? no…i don’t mean just a differing opinion…
i mean CRAAAAAAAAAAAAZEEEEEEE…..wooo woo nutso……and you let them get on TV?
I just watched the vid. “Peace of Westphalia”? Well at least we now know what standards the Sick Far Right adheres to, cause you know, I didn’t think they had any.
Maybe it was the 2nd Article’s beginning that SheWack was referring to?
“That there shall be on the one side and the other a perpetual Oblivion, Amnesty, or Pardon of all that has been committed since the beginning of these Troubles,…..”
Course the U.S. never signed the Treaty. And it was so successful in bringing Peace that my ancestors fled Alsace soon after.
Peace.
I just read the Salon article. Left me thinking: Typical wingnut! When confronted with her own malicious behavior she blamed others… that guy she accused of rape, and then the harrassment coordinator… just typical.
rasta @ 32:
Sadly Rasta, a lot of Americans are crazy too. Not a majority, but enough. Remember, the crazier side gets the most attention, since they are indeed fucking NUTS about their beliefs, and the rest of us have too much shit to do to spend all our time at rallies, lobbying Congressmen, and picketing funerals.
Look, I don’t know where else to post this, and no one has their e-mail addresses around, so I’m just going to post it here. I think Crooks and Liars should spread this article as much as they can. Today’s issue of the Independent in the UK had an article featuring an interview with Malcolm Nance, an advisor on terrorism to the US departments of Homeland Security.
LINK
Nance talks about how waterboarding is used at the SERE school (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School in San Diego) to teach our people what waterboarding feels like in case they’re ever captured and tortured. In his words:
“waterboarding is a torture technique – period”.
The practice involves strapping the person being interrogated on to a board as pints of water are forced into his lungs through a cloth covering his face while the victim’s mouth is forced open. Its effect, according to Mr Nance, is a process of slow-motion suffocation.
[…]
While US media reports typically state that waterboarding involves “simulated drowning”, Mr Nance explained that “since the lungs are actually filling with water”, there is nothing simulated about it. “Waterboarding,” he said, “is slow-motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of blackout and expiration. When done right, it is controlled death.”
Please make this a front page feature. Spread it everywhere, I just don’t know how to contact anyone about it. I read this article today and it really upset me. It tells what waterboarding really is.
Canuknotusa @ 23:
NOOOOOoooooooooooo!
Where do these assholes get their talking points?
The Peace of Westphalia was an accord signed as a peace treaty in the 1600s!!!! There are no binding regulations for countries not involved in the accords. And the main tenets of those accords had to do mostly with religious freedom in central Europe, the Peace of Westphalia allowed for Christians living in places where their denomination was not the established church were guaranteed the right to practice their faith in public during allotted hours and in private at their will. The second outcome/regulation of this peace was the carving of the German and Prussian territories.
The Geneva Convention is a completely different animal. It is a binding resolution, and which the US of A as a co-signer is bounded by BTW, regulating warfare, international conflict, and prisoner treatment. The interesting tidbit is that if the republicons want to make it an issue of definition of these prisoners as whether or not they are considered “enemy combatants,” then it becomes an issue that the accused are not war prisoners and thus not bounded by the Geneva Convention… but as soon as that is the case, these prisoners become convicts. And as such, the US of A is bonded by its constitution as it is the law of the land here. That is what most of the defense of the poor saps at Guantanamo has fought under. And why the US of A is
The fact of the matter is that these so called “CIA sponsored swimming lessons” –whoah, that is Compassionate Conservatism at its finest, eh? Where do these people get their lack of humanity from? Just ignore for a second that we live in a society that has deemed acceptable for a person to utter those words as a joke in a public forum and be OK with it, or at least not run out of the room with a wet sock– are not only illegal under the Geneva Convention… but they are also illegal under the laws of our land. Either way, this administration is breaking the law by torturing people, either if they are considered “enemy combatants” or “common criminals.”
So basically, this discussion is about oranges (The Geneva Convention and torture), and this asshole lady replies with something about apples (The Peace of Westphalia). Why bother any more…
An even stupider version of Coulter, I didn’t think it was possible.
raker @ 2 Says:
e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_torture
Waterboarding’s number two after forced ingestion.
Well, maybe these right-wingers think “waterboarding” is a kinky sex act.
I posted a comment a few seconds ago and I’m not seeing it, which has never happened before on C&L, so I’m going to post it again.
C&L, Sitemonitor, please use this story from today’s Independent. They talk with Malcolm Nance, a DHS adviser, about waterboarding. Just the headline alone should tell you why you should spread this as far as you can.
LINK
Waterboarding is torture - I did it myself, says US advisor
While US media reports typically state that waterboarding involves “simulated drowning”, Mr Nance explained that “since the lungs are actually filling with water”, there is nothing simulated about it. “Waterboarding,” he said, “is slow-motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of blackout and expiration. When done right, it is controlled death.”
I can’t find anyone’s e-mail address to send them this article, and it is a fantastic article. It honestly upset me to read it. I don’t know how else to get the word out, so please spread it around.
Oh well, another republican with sexual issues, what’s new here, she looks like a nympho and a bag full of problems to me, you know, the kind of chick one meet and get intimated with, then two days later she vandalizes your house for not calling back. Nice piece of work.
Marsden truly puts the “ditz” in pundits. What a whack job. Mental instability must be a requirement for being a Neocon.
Speaking on behalf of Canadians, I apologize for inflicting this kook on you. We’ll try to keep them at home. *hides face*
What is heard on talk shows and talk radio today in the U.S. is reminiscent of what Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies said in their important work “American Dream-Global Nightmare” when they wrote, “