Like Rachel said, if you’re going to tow the line on the absurd notion that absent WMD, democracy in Iraq will make the failure of the Bush Administration to make a rational decision about invading it, go away.

Ridge @78:

I believe waterboarding to be torture, it is wrong, and I’m told generally ineffective. I do not believe that on the few occasions that it was used in the aftermath of 911, that the individuals so involved should be prosecuted.

Ridge @28:

I have been and will always be a proud member of the Republican Party. I am disappointed that while we controlled the Presidency and Congress prior to this administration that we abandoned some of our basic principles as they relate to fiscal policy.

Neil, you often make great points and I frequently agree with you. But I think that Ridge did more than simply blow smoke. You are free to disagree, and certainly the discussion could have gone farther, but stating that he believes waterboarding is torture, and also that the Republicans completely blew fiscal responsibility is — for a Republican who served under Bush — not simply ‘blowing smoke’.

Is the conversation what you might want?
Clearly not.
But after years of the nefarious Limbaugh, the preening O’Reilly, and the vicious Ann Coulter, as far as I’m concerned this is progress and I hope to see a whole lot more of it.

It’s a start.
That’s nothing to scoff at.

Thx to Gov Ridge, CHS, Jane Hamsher, and the server squirrels who keep the servers running.

I’d like to start with what I wrote above and see if you have thoughts on loyalty and service — where does it lie, to the chief executive or to the nation as a whole? I remember that being an issue during Congressional testimony on the US attorney firings, and I’d love your thoughts on that.

Ridge @ 22

Your wonderful questions gives me pause to reflect on my entire career of public service that has consumed most of my adult life. It is a worthy, noble and necessary pursuit regardless of whether it effects elected office or not. Regardless whether my service as an infantry soldier, Prosecutor, Congressman, Governor, Assistant to the President or Secretary, I have worked to remain loyal to the principles that I have learned throughout life, including hard work, tolerance, integrity.

Un-fucking-believable. The guy won’t touch it. Instead, he’s going to blow smoke up your ass. Tom Ridge, Harvard Dud.

Like Rachel said, if you’re going to tow the line on the absurd notion that absent WMD, democracy in Iraq will make the failure of the Bush Administration to make a rational decision about invading it, go away.

He never did follow up on his statement that the torturers should not be prosecuted…implying that the use of water-boarding, while torture, was rare. Would that not actully be MORE justification for prosecution (falling into the “cruel and unusual” umbrella? In addition, punishing those “bad apples” who authorized and performed torture would serve as a deterrant, as well as be limited to a few individuals.

I found it interesting that he heard that the treatment was “ineffective”. Several of the Orange Alerts were triggered by intelligence gained in interrogations using these torture methods (not merely waterboarding but sleep deprivation, hours of positions in tiny darkened boxes, hanging people in closets where they had to stnd on tip-toe, nudity in temperature extreme rooms, daipering people in their own waste for 48 hours, etc.

So these people confessed to plots…the country went on alert…shutting down bridges into San Francisco, closing airports, making people panic about their gas stations, apartment buildings, amusement parks, Federal offices, etc. Hundreds of millions of dollars were lost to the economy. Not a single real plot was uncovered, not a single terrorist involved in one of the “operations” were ever located.

After the alerts were downgraded it was admitted by DHHS that the “sources” provided false or erroneous information.

I wonder when Ridge learned about the methods used to gain the information, and if he immediately stated to the Cabinet that the technigues used were utterly unreliable whatever they were. Any responsible Director and member of the Cabinet would have raised such concerns after false negatives. He would have asked “How was this info obtained? Why is it unreliable (people under torture will lie, make up things or are highly suggestible to the “interrogators” push about people or events)?

That issue…what did you know…and when..and why you didn’t stop it…are still hanging over Ridges’ head.

I’m glad not all Republicans are like Gov. Ridge. They would be much harder to beat. It’s a shame the way he is treated by the far right wing of his party.

With this Book Salon, as much as I appreciate the effort in putting it together, Ridge had the upper hand: he could “answer” whichever question he chose; he could ignore most all of them; there was no ability for follow-up.

OTOH, I don’t think he generated any book sales here.

I’ve said for a long time that Americans, at least those portrayed by republicans, embarrass me. What a bunch of wimps.

I guess we are a bit concerned about upholding the honor of dfh’s. And, I think some of us did repeat our questions = Cassie did, I did, and several others.

Oh, I know you did. And, like I said, I appreciate it. It’s just sad they got ignored.

It isn’t like we expect to be in the room at his next presser, so we’re not about access next time.

What if you were? I agree with Mommybrain, we ARE a polite bunch and at times that is used against us. So we need to be smarter and be aware of that. You are right this format does somewhat work against us.

Envision this. Gov. Ridge was asked the question about waterboarding and torture. He gave his response. This lead to jayt’s excellent follow up at 92. At this point a very significant follow-up questions is on the table about the Japanese case of waterboarding.

Now the Gov. might dance around it and he can if he has enough other questions to get to. But if the entire conversation had come to a halt and everyone said, “We yield our time/questions to jayt as we await an answer to that question.” And if jayt doesn’t feel that the answer is satisfactory we ask it again.

When I was blogging about the pet food crisis in 2007 in which pet food tainted with melamine from China killed over 4,000 cats and dogs, I saw how the FDA controlled the journalists with these kinds of techniques, using the limits of the format to their advantage. They held telephone conference calls. One question PER NEWS ORGANIZATION. No follow ups. They controlled the phoneline, they controlled who got on the call, they controlled who got called on. At one point the FDA “answered” a question with something that the LA Times had debunked the day before (about the Chinese holding up visas giving the melamine factory time to bulldoze it to the ground.” This was obstruction pure and simple. The reporter from the LA Times who wrote that story was on the call. He couldn’t tell them. “You are wrong, I know you are wrong because I wrote the opposite of that yesterday. The Chinese DID hold up the visas and it was so they could destroy the evidence.”

I suggested to the assembled journalists that they set up an online chat room in situations like this with other organizations so that if they had already given up their question someone else could ask it. I also suggested that they change the format to allow follow ups. But they had already been manipulated and played.

Because they were manipulated the public never got important life and death information about that crisis.

1) Scope: The number of sick and dead cats and dogs was minimized. It wasn’t “a few dozen” but TENS of THOUSANDS. Scope makes a difference.

2) Chickens and pigs were fed the exact same food that killed over 4,000 cats and dogs. Those chickens and pigs went to your kids. This is because the recalled pet food wasn’t destroyed but sold to chicken and pig processing plants. That then went into the human food supply.

Does it bother you to know that the FDA wouldn’t tell you the name of the processor that mainstreamed the 20,000,000 chickens and 56,000 pigs who at the same melamine that killed babies in China the next year?

How did they keep this info away from the press? They used the format of the phone Q&A and the inability of the press to work together on this. To battle this I organized the 6 most prominent pet bloggers with conference calls so that we could work together and not get played.

Dick Durbin was able to ask brilliant questions of the head of the Pet Food Lobbying companies because of us. We had a list of recalled pet foods that was better than what the FDA had, we broke many newly recalled foods. Durbin, in his hearing with the FDA, held up our list and said, “Why can’t you do a list that is as good and as current as a bunch of bloggers?”

Oh and I know the name of the processor that fed the tainted food to the chickens and pigs. But I can’t tell you. Why? Because I don’t want to get into the same kind of “food disparagement lawsuit” with Big Pig that Oprah got into with Big Beef. Unlike a newspaper or Oprah I don’t have a legal staff to protect me.

This is why we need journalists to do their jobs and help them when we can. And when we have opportunities to act like journalists we rise to the task. This community has done more in this area than almost any other but we always need to remember the ways that we can be played.