Israeli soldier shoots three children close range.

Israeli soldier shoots three children, ages 2, 4 and 7, close range. The girls were on the front steps of their house holding white flags, with their mother and grandmother, having been ordered to evacuate. The soldier who shot them was not under fire, and shot slowly and methodically from on top of a tank turret. The seven year old died instantly. The two year old died in minutes. The seven year old was carried a mile to the hospital by her father, past Israeli soldiers eating potato chips and chocolates.

Details of the story were confirmed by three witnesses to The World's correspondent. The IDF said it would investigate.

The Georgia-Russia War Explained in 5 Year Old Terms

Apparently I feel like blogging today.

Caroline sometimes plays this "game" with me called "Does this bother you?" It begins with her touching my knee and saying "Does this bother you?"

"No, of course not sweetie."

"Does this bother you?" She starts tickling my knee.

"Mmm, can I finish reading this please?"

"Does this bother you?" She tickles my side.

"Seriously, let me read this."

"Does this bother you?" She pinches my armpit in a way that she calls tickling but really hurts like hell.

"WILL YOU FUCKING STOP THAT!!!!"

Ok, now imagine that Caroline is Georgia, I'm Russia, and "WILL YOU FUCKING STOP THAT" is a column of tanks followed by paramilitary Ossetian thugs committing war crimes with impunity.

Stump the Yoo!

From the studios of Amygdala, as seen on Pharyngula and The Sideshow, it is America's new hit game show Stump the Yoo!

You see, torture memo author John Yoo has had some trouble answering straightforward questions about presidential power. John Conyers of the House Judiciary Committee asked him

"Is there anything, Professor Yoo, that the president could not order to be done to a suspect, if he believed it necessary for national defense?...Could the president order a suspect buried alive?"

Yoo couldn't come up with a straight answer.

Yoo has trouble with questions like this all the time. When he does give a straight answer, it is pretty alarming. Law Professor Doug Cassel asked

"If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?"

The answer? Well no treaty stops him, and US law might not stop him, depending on what his reasons for ordering a child's testicles crushed were.

So Amygdala's Gary Farber has issued a challenge: What other tricky questions can we use to flummox John Yoo. Farber's entry:

Can the president order the arms of a suspect eaten by wolves while still attached?

Pharyngula suggests:

"Can the president order a suspect to be impaled for his lunchtime entertainment?"

The Sideshow:

"Is there anything Hitler did that a president of the United States can't do?"

Pharyngula's commentators

• Can a president order a person to eat his own foot?
• Can the President order a person to shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die?
• Could the president order you, Mr. Yoo, to be renditioned to Saudi Arabia to be interrogated, then decapitated? And if not, why not?
• Can a president have a man's hands removed and surgically replaced with the tentacles of an octopus just to see what would happen?
• Could the president order me to turn myself inside-out?
• Could the president order that the suspect must travel in time to save Lincoln?
• Could the President make you, John Yoo, answer my questions with a simple "Yes" or "No" response?
• Can the president order a suspect to eat a booger sandwich?

These are really fun. When Boredom Strikes asks if the president can order someone be drowned in Splenda? My contribution:

Can the President order his enemies to be crushed and driven before him so he may hear the lamentations of their women?

I think people who take Yoo's constitutional law class should ask him questions like these after every lecture.

senior administration officials signed off on individual cases of torture.

According to ABC news Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Tenet, and Ashcroft met personally dozens of times to ok a list of specific tactics to be used on specific captives, including the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah.

Here, at last, evidence that the principles of the Bush administration directly authorized war crimes. Now can we have some justice?

The government put you in a box until you go crazy and doesn't have to explain why

Jose Padilla's lawyers are now alleging that he is unfit to stand trial because his confinement has driven him insane. Also the NY Times has obtained a video of a dental visit Padilla received while in confinement.

“Today is May 21,” a naval official declared to a camera videotaping the event. “Right now we’re ready to do a root canal treatment on Jose Padilla, our enemy combatant.”

Several guards in camouflage and riot gear approached cell No. 103. They unlocked a rectangular panel at the bottom of the door and Mr. Padilla’s bare feet slid through, eerily disembodied. As one guard held down a foot with his black boot, the others shackled Mr. Padilla’s legs. Next, his hands emerged through another hole to be manacled.

Wordlessly, the guards, pushing into the cell, chained Mr. Padilla’s cuffed hands to a metal belt. Briefly, his expressionless eyes met the camera before he lowered his head submissively in expectation of what came next: noise-blocking headphones over his ears and blacked-out goggles over his eyes. Then the guards, whose faces were hidden behind plastic visors, marched their masked, clanking prisoner down the hall to his root canal.

Please remember that although the government has accused Padilla in public first of being involved with 9-11 and then with plotting to use a dirty bomb, it has pressed none of those charges in court. Originally, of course, the government didn't want to have to charge Padilla with anything, or even explain what they were doing. Once the supreme court announced that it would rule on the legality of his confinement, he was quickly transferred to the civilian prison system, and charged only with sending money and other material support abroad to Muslim groups in Chechnya and Bosnia.

Padilla is not the only person to receive this treatment while on US soil. Less well publicized is the case of Ali al-Marrihas been declared an enemy combatant and held for four and a half years in a South Carolina prison. The conditions of al-Marri's imprisonment closely match Padilla's: the focus is on extreme isolation with periodic threats, including the threat that he would be raped, or that his wife would be raped in front of him.

Doesn't it make you proud to be an American? Oh yeah, and via Niel at Unfogged, ABC news caught army recruiters on tape telling potential enlistees that the war is over:

"Nobody is going over to Iraq anymore?" one student asks a recruiter.

"No, we're bringing people back," he replies.

Another good one:

Yet ABC News found one recruiter who even claimed if you didn't like the Army, you could just quit.

"It's called a 'Failure to Adapt' discharge," the recruiter said. "It's an entry-level discharge so it won't affect anything on your record. It'll just be like it never happened."

"We're not at war. War ended a long time ago," another recruiter says.

Yipee!

Time is reporting that Rumsfeld will be prosecuted for war crimes in Germany.

Just days after his resignation, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is about to face more repercussions for his involvement in the troubled wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. New legal documents, to be filed next week with Germany's top prosecutor, will seek a criminal investigation and prosecution of Rumsfeld, along with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former CIA director George Tenet and other senior U.S. civilian and military officers, for their alleged roles in abuses committed at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.