Just as Bush shopped for the Attorney's and Assistants to give him the answer he already had, so too has Leahy and his DINO and GOP cohorts shopped the "expert witness" list. Who inside The Beltway want accountability for extra Constitutional exploits or war crimes of the last Regime. How easy and self serving to hold hearing or Commissions when the worse case for someone called to expiate his sin is saying "I'm sorry and I have seen the errors of my ways and will not torture or maim any innocents again". It sure would have saved time, energy and money to hold War Crime Commissions instead of Tribunals after WWII. Why didn't Truman and Churchill understand

Rivkin needs to STFU: his views are false, fraudulent, and already discredited by the facts we've known, and the torture memoes so far released.

The only thing "exemplary" was the ability of the Bushit criminal enterprise to lie and keep everything secret. And that was anti- and UnAmerican.

My point exactly Thera P!

I guess that whole concept of improvement should be tossed out the window just like the geneva conventions were in so many cases of a thousand captured!

Oh and yes you are right Mr Rivkin some of the atrocities under Bush co simply don't measure up to the atrocities during the Reagan era, and yet your party continually puts Senor Reagan on this mantle on that shiny hill. Perhaps Bush was doing some of that fine cocaine that was filtering through the US during the Reagan, Iran-contra years. OH the good times!

Rivkin is an old right wing lawyer from the Reagan Administration. I saw him on C-SPAN a few times during those years, then he dropped out of sight. He came out of the woodwork about a year ago spinning like a whirling dervish in support of the Bush administration.

His chief duty is trying to put lipstick on a pig.

That is the lamest excuse I ever heard uttered and it's not the first time I have heard Rivkin use it. Compared to other despots he's a saint? If laws should be imposed on a relativity basis, then there's a whole lot of blue collar criminals that will be coming out of prison, because Bernie Madoff is confined to a mansion.

On a personal note, I wasn't kidnapped, rendered and tortured, but I did have all of my phone calls, cellphone calls and emails tapped without a warrant. This simply because I lived on the central California coast, and all of my communications were routed through the AT&T switches in San Francisco.

I know this sounds trivial to some, compared to actual torture, but I am rather quaint and believe in the protections afforded me under the Bill of Rights. I would like those who violated my rights to be prosecuted, found guilty and sentenced to prison.

Why? Because without such consequences, someone is much more likely to do it again.

Sure, Chairman Mao had lots more people killed; so did Stalin. But I wouldn't say Bush's orders to waterboard and torture some unfortunate people to death was "exemplary."

So Bush isn't as bad as Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot and Slobodan Milosevic.

How comforting.

So much for those Rape of Nanking jokes I wrote for my niece's wedding. Thanks a lot, Rivkin!