Now here's some real tortured illogic

From an AP story about the White House admission today that yes, the U.S. has used waterboarding but claiming that it's not illegal.
Officials fear calling waterboarding torture or illegal could expose government employees to criminal or civil charges or even international war crimes charges.
Now, this is so utterly without merit that it's hard to credit that so-called adult men and women would even say such a stupid thing. But at the risk of insulting the dear reader's intelligence, I'll point out the obvious. It's a war crime whether or not the war criminal calls it a crime. Indeed, most criminals, even petty ones, have many rationalizations for what they do and rarely admit that what they're doing is wrong or a crime.

Filibustering for the Rule of Law

As Glenn Greenwald explains: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
Democrat Loser-in-Chief Harry Reid, who hasn't found it necessary to force the GOP to actually filibuster a single thing during his reign, merely let then threaten to do so, in order to kill legislation, is planning to make Chris Dodd conduct an actual talk-til-you-drop filibuster to stop the telecom immunity bill.
Well, as unfair as it is, there is silver lining to all this, because it may cause the issue to get a real public airing. The media would like nothing more than a dramatic filibuster the like of which hasn't been seen in years. There'll be scope for all sorts of stories, CNN live updates and hours and hours of airtime. They were gearing up last time for it but Reid headed it off by delaying
action on the issue until this year.
Evidently Reid, who has no principles himself, can't recognize them in other people and he calculated that Dodd was merely grandstanding for campaign purposes when he announced his filibuster plans. Reid assumed Dodd would drop it once his campaign was over.
Of course Dodd does, actually, appear to have a principled stand on this issue.
What the political hacks who pass for "leaders" these days don't understand is that ordinary people will respect someone with principles, even if they don't agree with them. Two of the most respected presidential candidates are Obama and McCain, who are respected by many who disagree on their policy positions. Meanwhile, the two most disrespected candidates -- Romney and the Clintons, barely have the respect of some people who agree with them and no respect at all from those opposed to their policies.

Actually, it IS an indictment of the system

There are few things more predictable than pablum from law enforcement officials about how any outrage perpetrated by the criminal justice system is just an "isolated incident" or "mistake." Whether it's another botched SWAT raid on an innocent home-dweller, a questionable police shooting or someone exonerated after spending many years in prison for a crime he didn't commit, it's never the system at fault.
Sometimes they will even claim that the fact that Mr. John Doe was released after spending several decades in prison is proof that the system works. No, that's a system failure folks. Especially when the system works so hard to prevent those exonerations from going forward.
The latest is a certain Timothy Masters, released after spending nine years in a Colorado prison for murder when DNA tests proved he wasn't the killer after all.
The DA (not the one who put him away), Larry Abrahamson, was quoted by the Associated Press as saying Masters' case " is not, in any way, and indictment of the criminal justice system."
Actually, it is, of course. We've had so many DNA exonerations that support for the death penalty in this country has eroded significantly and overall trust in the system declined.
I don't have a philosophical argument with the death penalty in theory, but my faith that it's can be fairly, consistently and justly be applied has evaporated.
One also has to wonder how many people are sitting in jail for crimes they didn't commit that don't lend themselves to DNA evidence.
We've had many DNA-based exonerations for murders and rapes, which both often leave usable DNA evidence. These cases also get the most attention from the police and from the innocence projects.
But it seem logical that the error rate for many other crimes is at least as high. But convenience store robbers, burglars, drug offenders, etc., don't often leave relevant DNA evidence, and even if they did, no effort would be expended on finding it for such low-level crimes.
It's often said as a joke that prisons are full of "innocent men." There may be more truth to the joke than we thought.