Planet Wingnut News for Thursday.

Two Days After Defending Waterboarding, Lieberman Now Claims He’s ‘Strongly Opposed’ To It
In a letter to President Obama yesterday, Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) asked him to resist prosecuting Bush administration officials who wrote legal memos authorizing torture. "Pursuing such prosecutions would, we believe, have serious negative effects," wrote the three senators.

Acknowledging that the Office of Legal Counsel memos were "deeply flawed," the three senators claim that they have always been "strongly opposed" to torturous interrogation tactics like waterboarding:

We disagree, however, with Administration statements suggesting that the lawyers who provided such counsel may now be open to prosecution. Some of the legal analysis included in the OLC memos released last week was, we believe, deeply flawed. We have also strongly opposed the overly coercive interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, that these memos deemed legal. We do not believe, however, that legal analysis should be criminalized, as proposals to prosecute government lawyers suggest.

Fleischer On Torture Memos: ‘I Have No Problem With’ Sleep Deprivation
While discussing the recent release of Bush-era Office of Legal Counsel torture memos last night on CNN, host Anderson Cooper asked President Bush's former press secretary Ari Fleischer if he believes that torture took place. "Waterboarding is pretty close to the line," Fleischer responded. "Sleep deprivation," however, "I have no problem with," he said.
Cooper noted that the torture tactics OLC lawyers authorized were "techniques that the Nazis used," but Fleischer dismissed this concern. "I think it's all how it's conducted and to what extent things go," he added, justifying the techniques because "medical people" were "present."

Hearing footsteps: Rove sounds freaked out at notion of torture prosecutions
Karl was positively freaking out Tuesday afternoon over the prospect that some of his ex-colleagues at the White House might wind up being prosecuted -- or held responsible publicly -- for helping George W. Bush install a torture regime during his tenure, after President Obama's statement earlier in the day indicating he'd leave the decision up to the Attorney General.

Rove, appearing on Sean Hannity's Fox News show, was particularly frantic -- and when Rove gets frantic, he gets nasty:
Rove: Sure, as long as they've released the limits to which America will go to extract this information, let's share the information that was extracted, and saved America from further attacks. We know, for example -- it's already a part of the public record -- that the interrogation of these high-value targets kept them from being able to attack Los Angeles by flying airplanes into the Liberty tower, the tallest building in Los Angeles, which was one of their plans.

But look, let's step back for a minute. What the Obama administration has done in the last several days is very dangerous. What they've essentially said is, If we have policy disagreements with our predecessors, what we're going to do is we're going to turn ourselves into the moral equivalent of a Latin American country run colonels in mirrored sunglasses. And what we're going to do is prosecute, systematically, the previous administration, or threaten prosecutions against the previous administration, based on policy differences.

Is that what we've come to in this country? That if we have a change in administration from one party to another, that we then use the tools of the government to go systematically after the policy disagreements that we have with the previous administration? Now that may be fine in some little Latin American country that's run by, you know, the latest junta. It may be the way that they do things in Chicago. But that's not the way we do things here in America.