Battle over tactics raged at Gitmo - International Terrorism - MSNBC.com

A fascinating story on MSNBC about dueling cultures of detaine interrogation within the military, and how military lawyers foresaw the intelligence and PR nightmare that would become of Bush's "alternative" techniques (torture) at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere:

Battle over tactics raged at Gitmo - International Terrorism - MSNBC.com

Balkinization

Balkinization:

"There are many things that are deeply distressing about the Military Commissions Act of 2006. One of the most distressing is its deeply cynical attitude about law. The President has created a new regime in which he is a law unto himself on issues of prisoner interrogations. He decides whether he has violated the laws, and he decides whether to prosecute the people he in turn urges to break the law. And all the while he insists that everything he does is perfectly legal, because, the way the law is designed, there is no one with authority to disagree.

It is a travesty of law under the forms of law. It is the accumulation of executive, judicial, and legislative powers in a single branch and under a single individual.

It is the very essence of tyranny."

Google has just released a combined word processing and spreadsheet program and I'm trying it out.

Bush cites authority to bypass FEMA law - The Boston Globe

Lawless.