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Jesse Ventura on Torture

I’m liking Jesse Ventura more and more. Last week: give me a water board, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders This week: “If waterboarding is OK, why don’t we let our police do it to suspects so they can learn what they know?” he asked. “If waterboarding is OK, why didn’t we waterboard [Timothy] McVeigh and Nichols, the Oklahoma City bombers, to find out if there were more people involved? … We only seem to waterboard Muslims… Have we waterboarded anyone else? Name me someone else who has been waterboarded.”

Columbia and Ahmedinejad

Here’s Stanley Fish’s take on the Ahmedinejad controversy at Columbia. I agree that there are other politics around Middle East Studies at Columbia that Bollinger needs to address. However, I disagree that Bollinger should have taken it down a degree. Columbia is a major world player from its overseas campuses, international fellowships, and just by nature of being in NY with an international student body. The World Leaders Forum functions because of Columbia’s proximity to the UN. I think Bollinger’s statement was poorly worded, his words ill-chosen. I think he should have expressed the sentiment, but expressed it better. Ahmedinejad…

Penis Slicing and Cheney is more Taliban than the Taliban – #torture

Andrew Sullivan brings us two torture related stories today. One pulls on reporting by Glenn Greenwald, in which we find out Binyam Mohamed had his genitals sliced open as torture. If, for some reason, that image doesn’t nauseate you, imagine his name was Benjamin Moses (it is the Hebrew equivalent) and he was in Taliban custody. We surely would be up in arms. Speaking of the Taliban, Andrew also tells us that the Taliban treat their prisoners better than Vice-President Cheney did.