corrente

We'd better take a break from Cheney Love and devote today to Rumsfeld Love. Anybody with connections to the Kerry campaign, forward this with a suggestion that JFK call at once for Rummy's firing. We need this man to stay right where he hangs, an increasingly heavy albatross.

(via NYT)

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Thursday said there was no evidence that prisoners had been abused during interrogations, contradicting two major investigative reports issued this week.

..In an interview with a radio station in Phoenix, Mr. Rumsfeld, who was traveling outside Washington this week, said, "I have not seen anything thus far that says that the people abused were abused in the process of interrogating them or for interrogation purposes." A transcript of the interview was posted on the Pentagon's Web site on Friday. Mr. Rumsfeld repeated the assertion a few hours later at a news conference in Phoenix, adding that "all of the press, all of the television thus far that tried to link the abuse that took place to interrogation techniques in Iraq has not yet been demonstrated."

Mr. Rumsfeld also misstated an important finding of an independent panel he appointed and is led by James R. Schlesinger, a former defense secretary, saying in the interview with KTAR radio, "The interesting thing about the Schlesinger panel is their conclusion that, in fact, the abuses seem not to have anything to do with interrogation at all."

But the first paragraph of the Schlesinger panel report says, "We do know that some of the egregious abuses at Abu Ghraib which were not photographed did occur during interrogation sessions and that abuses during interrogation sessions occurred elsewhere."

If this is a variant on the Chewbacca Defense (non-South Park fans click over in the Lexicon on the right) it is too subtle for me to pick up. I think he's just losing it.

This of course all happened before CBS revealed (scroll down a post or two) that Rummy has had an Israeli spy in his office for some time now. Pat Buchanan hinted that this ties in somehow with the Plame investigation, so hang on to the "Roll the Scooter Out Of Here" posters, we may have to repaint them.

UPDATE: Dammit, Xan's Going With the "Sadly, No!" Defense!

My bad. It's "Sadly, No!" that has the Chewbacca Defense listed on the right column of their page, not this one.

Gerald (Whispering): Dammit. [...] He's using the Chewbacca defense. Johnny Cochrane: Why would a Wooky, an eight-foot-tall Wooky, want to live on Endor with a bunch of two-foot-tall Ewoks. That does not make sense. [...] It does not make sense. Look at me. I'm a lawyer defending a major record company and I'm talkin' about Chewbacca. Does that make sense? Ladies and Gentlemen I'm am not making any sense. None of this makes sense. And so you have to remember when you're in that jury room deliberating and conjugating the Emancipation Proclamation, does it make sense? No. Ladies and Gentlemen of this deposed jury it does not make sense. If Chewbacca lives on Endor you must acquit. The defense rests.

Esteemed commenter Bilge notes the second usage of the CD in the comments below; the quote above is the first one. For a fuller and deeper understanding of the profundity of the requirements involved in the deliberating and conjugating of the issue, we refer scholars to the transcript of the South Park in question, known as "Chef Aid".