"Queen of Obama's Hot Nerds"

As is often the case, MoDo no doubt has the line of the day. 

However, the story of the day is this: Susan Crawford, the retired judge charged with overseeing the potential criminal cases against Guantanamo detainees, has become the first high-level Bush administration official to publicly declare that a U.S. detainee has been tortured while in custody.  

In the last 8 years, the government of the United States and their lawyers have repeatedly twisted the language of our laws, international obligations and even the Constitution, seemingly to suit their every whim.  Given this, I wouldn't begrudge anyone for believing that the law, especially as it is applied to the most powerful in our society, is an inherently malleable and unprincipled thing; existing more for lawyers to try and out-smart other lawyers in order to redefine the law for the benefit of a particular client.  After all, if government lawyers can simply make up their own interpretation what the law means, consistently pushing the boundaries of a common sense understanding of the English language, where do we draw the line? 

I would suggest that the judicial system, while imperfect, remains our last, best protector against this type of arbitrary or ideological interpretation of our laws.  Judges are the ultimate neutral arbiters of disputes, due in large part to their professional obligation to the rule of law which is predicated more on a common sense evaluation of the facts than ideology or other ulterior motives.  Does this mean that judges don't have some fundamental ideological beliefs that inform the decisions they make? Of course not.  "Common sense" does not exist in a vacuum, and reasonable people can disagree.  However, to date, judges, more than our elected representatives in either Congress or the administration, have often been the only group that has been able to restore some sanity to what has become a consistent disregarding of the law at the highest levels of our government. (see: government transparency, wiretapping, detention policy)  And now, thanks to Susan Crawford, someone with the legal authority to do something about it has called the the Bush administration's interrogation policy what it is: torture.