In Brief: Marc Thiessen Gets Treats from His Masters When He Lies:
Rotund waterboarding enthusiast Marc Thiessen, the former Bush speechwriter and walking man-turd, writes about the upcoming sentencing of Ahmad Ghailani, who was convicted on one of many counts related to U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, "In 2007, after being transferred from CIA custody to Guantanamo Bay, he was interviewed by the FBI and provided a confession he acknowledged was completely voluntary...had the jury known about Ghailani's confession, this al-Qaeda terrorist likely would have been convicted on 285 counts, not one." The mean ol' judge didn't admit the confession or other statements about Ghailani from other witnesses.

You read that and, if you're not following such things or you don't know that Thiessen is the kind of cretinous anus-licker that the powerful have always counted on to do their bidding, you might think, "Huh, that is an injustice." Except, of course, Thiessen is lying by omission. Because, see, for two years, while in CIA custody, Ghailani was tortured at a secret black site, as were witnesses. And Judge Lewis Kaplan said, simply, that the law doesn't allow the admission of evidence gained from torture.

For Thiessen, of course, this means one simple thing: the American legal system sucks balls and alleged terrorists should only be tried in military commissions, where one can rewrite rules about what is and is not torture, thus allowing a statement made by the accused after a dozen or so near-death drownings. For anyone with what we might consider a "soul," the Ghailani case is Exhibit A in how much the Bush administration fucked up its own "War on Terror."

We are nearly ten years into this mad, endless war. Prisoners at Gitmo have been held without charge or trial for longer than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was in exile in the USSR (and even he was charged with a crime and given a show trial). And, really, the treatment of document leaker Bradley Manning, who is, you know, still an American citizen, is only marginally better. As for torture, in the Bush sense, it has been replaced by the evil efficiency of drone attacks on suspects.

What Thiessen is missing here, amid the denial of habeas corpus and assassinations, is that Ahmad Ghailani, who, charged or not, will never be a free man, is an exception, an aberration, not a sign of things to come for suspects and detainees of all stripes and nations. And that, barring some seismic event, like Oprah being disappeared, our American policies of isolation, exile, or murder, will continue unabated. Maybe Thiessen just misses the sounds of the gurgles and screams of the tortured.

(Note: The Rude Pundit will be on the Twitter machine during the State of the Union tonight, accompanied by some live whiskey-blogging.)