Who knew?

No doubt it's torture, says U.S. journalist after trying waterboarding

"Then two or three levels of towel were placed on the outside of my face so I was completely oblivious to the outside world, couldn't hear or see anything and was wondering how I was going to carry on breathing … and then water began coming through the towel into my nostril and that was the situation."

A wet hand was also held over his face and breathing in caused the wet towel to cover his nose.

"It had the effect very rapidly of inducing a panic and gag reflex," Hitchens said. "It's almost impossible to avoid doing that, even though … you have some idea of what's coming and what's going on, your system overrides your brain in a sense and all you want to do is make sure you're not breathing water."

My favorite part from the graphic "Origins traced to the Spanish Inquisition". And we said we didn't know it was torture....

Our Secret Little War...

Who doesn't love a secret little war now and then?

Apparently Our Government.

And when I say 'our government' I'm mostly talking about the current administration, though it seems the Democratic leadership isn't doing a lot to stop things.

In a nutshell, we have soldiers and spies running around inside Iran, grabbing people, killing people. We're assured they're all bad guys of course... but in making friends with the enemies of Iran, apparently we've started funding Sunni fundamentalists...

The Administration may have been willing to rely on dissident organizations in Iran even when there was reason to believe that the groups had operated against American interests in the past. The use of Baluchi elements, for example, is problematic, Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. clandestine officer who worked for nearly two decades in South Asia and the Middle East, told me. “The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda,” Baer told me. “These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers—in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we’re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.” Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered one of the leading planners of the September 11th attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists.

Well, all I know is we need to trust our government. They obviously know better than we do...

Heck, what could go wrong?