Bill Maher: Evolution and the Swine Flu

Gotta love the New Rule.

Pope Benedict: Tear Down This Wall

I'm not surprised that the Pope's trip to Israel is slightly controversial. I'm really surprised at the tone he's setting.

From Reuters:

Pope Benedict stood by the wall Israel has built round the West Bank Wednesday and called it a symbol of "stalemate" between Israel and the Palestinians, urging both sides to break a "spiral of violence."

"Towering over us ... is a stark reminder of the stalemate that relations between Israelis and Palestinians seem to have reached -- the wall," he said in a speech at a refugee camp in Bethlehem, the town where Christians believe Jesus was born.

"How we earnestly pray for an end to the hostilities that have caused this wall to be built," he said, on an outdoor stage at a camp school, across a road from the 8-meter (25-foot) concrete wall and an Israeli watchtower.

It was the kind of imagery and language that Palestinians had been hoping for from the pope's one-day visit to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, in the middle of a five-day tour of the Holy Land, mostly focused on Israeli-controlled Jerusalem.

The German-born pope, who found himself criticized in Israel over what Jews saw as a lack of personal emotion in remarks he made about the Holocaust, was careful to stress that the conflict involved two sides, and urged a just and lasting peace.

"On both sides of the wall, great courage is needed if fear and mistrust is to be overcome, if the urge to retaliate for loss or injury is to be resisted," he said.

Zelikow On Tortured Logic

From the Washington Post:

Former State Department counselor Philip Zelikow told the first congressional panel convened to address allegations of torture that the Bush administration officials engaged in a "collective failure" on detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists.

Fresh accounts today by Zelikow and retired FBI special agent Ali Soufan, who dissented from Justice Department conclusions about the legality of waterboarding prisoners, are likely to expose anew rifts within the highest levels of the Bush administration over the practices.

The testimony comes amid calls for criminal prosecutions, disbarment or a wide-ranging congressionally chartered probe of former government officials and contractors for their activities during the Bush war on terror.

"We were told that waterboarding was determined to be legal, but were not told how badly the law was ignored, bastardized and manipulated by the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel nor were we told how furiously government and military lawyers rejected the defective OLC opinions," Whitehouse said.

David Luban, a law professor at Georgetown University, also testified at the hearing and called the Bush era legal memos "an ethical train wreck."

"I believe it's impossible that lawyers of such great talent and intelligence could have written these memos in the good faith belief that they accurately state the law," Luban said. He added that Justice Department lawyers had a special responsibility not to "rubber stamp administration policies" or "provide cover for illegal actions."

Instead, Luban concluded, memos written by Yoo, Bybee and their successor in the office, Steven G. Bradbury, "cherry pick" legal precedents and fail to consider or mention a 1983 case in which law enforcement officers were prosecuted for waterboarding prisoners to make them confess.

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