FREE PRE-TEEN GIRL IN PAKISTAN ACCUSED OF ACT DENIGRATING RELIGION

Free the pre-teen girl in Pakistan's tribal areas accused of burning sacred books.  There are many backward societies in the world that have never experienced an enlightenment.  This poor girl's hometown is one of them.

BUSH BECOMES HEAD TORTURER, VETOES BILL TO STOP CIA WATERBOARDING

Who is this medieval torturer that we have in the White House? Today George Bush vetoes a bill that would ban the CIA from using methods of torture, such as waterboarding, sleep deprivation, forced standing for long hours, and similar harsh methods.

Until the French Enlightenment in the 18th Century, all of these techniques were common. The Inquisition, harshest in Spain and Portugal, but existing all throughout Europe, made use of these same interrogation techniques.

Look what U.S. president George W. Bush has done! He has made the United States a pariah among all civilized nations by reintroducing these methods of torture that the whole civilized world rejects and bans. Bush has made America the Torturer of the World. How long will it take for the U.S. to recover from this reputation?

WHITE HOUSE TRIES TO SPIN ABSOLUTION FOR ORDERING TORTURE

The stuff coming out of the White House on waterboarding and how it isn't torture because some guys in the Office of Legal Counsel (read John Yoo and others) wrote a memo in which they said it wasn't - boggles the legal mind.

An opinion of the John Yoo cannot make something that exists not exist. It is not up to John Yoo to pass upon something like waterboarding and transform it into goldilocks like the alchemists of old.

Is waterboarding torture? We all know that it is. To say the opposite just won't pass the laugh test. If AG Mukasey and Intelligence Czar McConnell are unsure, then by all means they should volunteer to have themselves waterboarded.

Bush and Cheney and the rest of the gang will have some explaining to do in the near future. I mean before the International Court of Justice, and maybe even in front of a U.S. federal judge in the local district court. No self dealing will get them immunity from ordering the CIA to engage in torture.

By the way, I thought the Enlightenment in France in the Eighteenth Century put an end to such barbarisms and vestiges from the Inquisition. But no. Bush and Cheney have plunged Americans back into medieval days when trials by water and fire forced even the purest and most innocent to confess to unspeakable crimes.