More True Facts

As part of Torture Week, CIA director Michael Hayden is giving behind-doors testimony to the Senate and House intelligence committees on the destroyed tapes. The testimony follows an ABC interview with John Kiriakou, the first CIA officer to debrief Abu Zubaydah, who described the waterboarding of that suspect, defending it as "something that we needed to do." Given the closed nature of the Hayden testimony, expect little followup.

But the Senate also held open hearings yesterday on Guantanamo Bay. Testifying to the Senate Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security subcommittee was Brigadier General Thomas W. Hartmann, the legal adviser at Guantanamo Bay. According to the report, "Hartmann declined an invitation from South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham to say whether waterboarding violated the 1949 Geneva Conventions that prohibit cruel and degrading treatment of prisoners of war." As an illustration of the road where that leads, Hartmann then had no answer as to whether it would violate Geneva if a foreign army waterboarded a captured America. Rendering international laws pointless = fun!

But it was Sen. Durbin who had really eaten his Wheaties that morning-



"My focus is on the trials," Hartmann says. "I want to change that record." Yep, give him another 10 years, and they may even have one.