After this I am done for a couple of days

See the post below about my comments about the Ken Burns' documentary on PBS and how it made me see similarities between what happened with Japanese internment camps in the US and what is happening in our country today. Well, here is further evidence of that linkage.

Dan Froomkin writes in his White House Watch column today about the publication of a major New York Times story describing the Bush administration's ongoing circumvention of national and international prohibitions against barbaric interrogation practices. He quotes four blogger reactions.

1. Yale law professor Jack Balkin blogs, “Despite the fact that Congress repeatedly passed legislation stating that it was illegal for U.S. personnel to engage in torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, the Justice Department repeatedly redefined the terms of these prohibitions so that the CIA could keep doing exactly what the Justice Department had authorized to do before. Gonzales treated all of these laws as if they made no difference at all, as if they were just pieces of paper. . . . An essential component of the rule of law is transparency. The laws must be knowable, not only so that people can structure their behavior with fair warning, but also to prevent government officials from engaging in abuses of power. The Bush Administration has used the shibboleths of terrorism and national security to violate this basic principle. "The Administration said, 'Trust us.' And then this is what they did in secret."
2. Georgetown University law professor Marty Lederman blogs: "I am increasingly confident that when the history of the Bush Administration is written, this systematic violation of statutory and treaty-based law concerning fundamental war crimes and other horrific offenses will be seen as the blackest mark in our nation's recent history -- not only because of what was done, but because the programs were routinely sanctioned, on an ongoing basis, by numerous esteemed professionals -- lawyers, doctors, psychologists and government officers -- without whose approval such a systematized torture regime could not be sustained."
3. Blogger Hilzoy writes: "The techniques in question are repugnant. But in many ways, the administration's disregard for the law is worse. When your policies violate treaties you have signed and laws that are on the books, you are not supposed to come up with some clever way of explaining that appearances to the contrary, what you're doing is not illegal at all. You're supposed to stop doing it. When Congress decides to pass a law banning 'cruel, inhuman and degrading' treatment, you are supposed to stop engaging in such treatment, not to redefine 'cruel, inhuman and degrading' so that it doesn't apply to anything you want to do."
4. Glenn Greenwald blogs for Salon: "Congress could aggressively investigate. Criminal prosecutions could be commenced. Our opinion-making elite could sound the alarm. New laws could be passed, reversing the prior endorsements and imposing new restrictions, along with the will to enforce those laws. We still have the ability to vindicate the rule of law and enforce our basic constitutional framework. But does anyone actually believe any of that will be the result of these new revelations? We always possess the choice -- still -- to take a stand for the rule of law and our basic national values, but with every new day that we choose not to, those Bush policies become increasingly normalized, increasingly the symbol not only of 'Bushism' but of America."

Also from Froomkin - links to political cartoons on the Bush veto of SCHIP - Stuart Carlson, Ann Telnaes, David Horsey and John Sherffius.