Imagine if France arrested Osama bin Laden

* Eli:

'Understanding what the U.S. has done in the case of Luis Posada Carriles

Imagine if France arrested Osama bin Laden, and refused to extradite him to the United States on the grounds he would be tortured. Then imagine they refused to charge him with terrorism, but only with an immigration violation, and released him on bail. Now you'll have some idea of the situation with Luis Posada Carriles, with one exception - the United States does torture its prisoners, while Venezuela does not."

* athenae:

"You know, if I sucked at my job as much as these guys (AGAG) suck at theirs, I'd be fired by now, and sometimes I think that's what really pisses me off. That butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, National Guardsmen serving their second tour in Iraq, single moms working two jobs, they don't get the breaks. They don't get the license to just slack the hell off and make shit up to make their lives easier. Our government shouldn't be something we look at with disgust. Our leaders should be better than that, and at some point, I don't know which happened first, but two things happened: they stopped giving us what we deserved, and we stopped demanding it."

* DHinMI:

"As for Sibel Edmonds, you obviously haven't looked hard. There's lots about her credibility that have given people pause. Plenty of people want to believe her, and her story is plausible, but like Scott Ritter, there are holes in her credibility that make people hesitate to accept her claims at face value. "

my response.

* simon weighs in from the other side of the pond ocean:

Over here things have gone pretty quiet about the whole WMD fiasco. Chris Ames, a talented researcher and journalist, is keeping the ball firmly rolling with a new(ish) website at Iraq Dossier.Com.

He's leading the way with Freedom of Information Act requests for the very earliest draft of the infamous September WMD dossier, which by all accounts seems to have been written by one of the Foreign Office's so-called 'spin-doctors', rather that (as is suggested by such luminaries as former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and WMD Intelligence Inquiry supremo Lord Butler) John Scarlett and his Joint Intelligence Committee (the JIC).

As it stands right now the matter of the due release of this highly sensitive document, which is is potentially far more politically damaging than any of the earlier Downing Street Memos ever were, is currently with the supposedly independent-from-political-influence Information Commissioner. He shortly has to finalise his decision concerning the release of the missing (allegedly John Williams authored) first draft of the dossier. This document will conclusively show that Blair and Co have consistently conspired to bury the truth about the origins of the Dossier which led a great many UK MPs to vote for the war against Saddam on the grounds of his purported Weapons of Mass Destruction. My take on this is that the IC hasn't got much choice other than to release this document, and sometime sooner rather than sometime later, lest his credibility will be badly damaged otherwise. I also kind of suspect that as and when the document gets released, the serious media here are going to jump up-and-down-ten-to-a-dozen all over it. Serious stuff then. Anyone for another smoking gun?" ref 1, 2