Confronted with the question of whether waterboarding constituted torture, President Obama's nominee for CIA director pleaded ignorance, saying "I'm not a lawyer."
Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein did her best to secure the appointment of "torture czar" John Brennan by distracting from a proper accounting of the candidate's history with good-guy/bad-guy notions of American exceptionalism:
CodePink protesters disrupt confirmation hearings February 7, 2013. Photo by Jewel Samad, AFP/Getty Images
"When people hear 'American', they think someone who's upstanding... Mr. Awlaki is not an American citizen by where anyone in America would be proud."
New Yorker editor Amy Davidson poses whether attributions of "proud" and "upstanding" are a legitimate basis for judging fundamental questions of legal rights and due process.
