Of truffles, waterboarding and the dastardly Pakistani military

My favorite new crime: highway truffle robbery. Dennis Moore, Dennis Moore, riding through the land...

Arlen Specter will also vote for Mukasey. No surprise there, huh? Says Mukasey assured him privately that if there were a law against waterboarding, Bush would have to abide by it. So clearly that law should be passed – and signed into law – before the confirmation process goes any further.

State Dept Legal Advisor John Bellinger also refuses to rule out waterboarding. Indeed, it’s okay by him if foreign secret services use it on Americans.

Pakistan’s military has usually defended its coups as necessary to fight corruption or chaos or corruption of their precious bodily fluids or whatever, but Mush’s latest coup is clearly about nothing other than his own personal grip on power. The reputation of the military cannot but suffer from being associated with it. Yet I haven’t heard of any dissent at all within the military’s ranks, any reluctance to follow Musharraf’s orders.

By the way, I’ve created a new label for posts about Musharraf, dating back to 1999. Somewhere along the way, the usual spelling of his name gained an R.