Let us waterboard Karl Rove!

[If only this had happened! Photo from here.]

Karl Rove epitomizes the "bullies" I met in school many years ago. While full of bravado and bullshit, underneath they were cowards!

This "big" man who waged war from the sidelines, protected by presidents and flacks, and by the ignorance and stupidity of a large portion of the American population, he can pretend and preen without ever having to get his soft, lily-white hands dirty.

So, just the other day in a BBC interview, Karl the bully said he was "proud" of the fact that under his reign (Bush, you recall, more or less worked for him) the United States engaged in torturing other human beings.

"I'm proud what we used techniques that broke the will of these terrorists."

Well, he's rewriting history, of course, with that "broke the will of these terrorists" bit. And the examples he gave in the interview have all been debunked. What waterboarding did give us was a bunch of useless information because when you torture a person he/she will eventually tell you what you want to hear, true or not.

(The really sad thing about all of this is that it is very likely the 9/11 attacks could have been avoided if the Bush administration under Rove's leadership had paid the slightest attention to the intelligence it had been provided in the summer of 2001 which warned of just such a thing!)


In the interview, Rove went on to say he didn't consider waterboarding to be torture. Furthermore, he said, when we utilized such procedures, the torturees were told that they would not drown and a doctor was present. Why would the latter be necessary if it wasn't torture?


If he really believes waterboarding is not torture, then it would behoove him to bend over backward, figuratively and literally, and allow himself to undergo that non-torture - to demonstrate to the whole world that it isn't really torture - you know, just to be sure.

It is too bad that Rove and Rumsfeld and Cheney and Bush and all the criminal gang that ran our government into the ground with their lies and dreams of empire and most importantly, their grasping for oil, have not been tried in a court of law. For some reason, politically inspired it seems, they have been given a free pass (so they can write books to try to justify their unlawful behavior).

The least anyone who says waterboarding is not torture could do is undergo the process himself. Step up to the plate, Mr. Rove! We're calling your bluff.

But, like most bullies, you will run and hide when push comes to shove!