Star Wars -- the Phantom Memo?

By Aussiegirl
Tim Birdnow, over at Birdblog really has posted a delicious slicing and dicing analysis of this whole Durbin mess. He poses a number of pertinent questions about the whole premise of the affair that have yet to be asked in the media -- a few of these points have also been brought up in a good analysis on
In Deo Veritas by BillyD. Good work, guys -- ahead of the media curve again!! Here's a little taste of Tim's biting prose:

Mr. (cough) Durbin makes commentary based on an F.B.I. memo which has not been provided to Tom Delay or any other Republicans. Isn`t that convenient! Nobody from the Republican camp can verify that there really is such a memo. Nobody can verify that the memo says what the turban says it does. How convenient! We have a phantom memo which claims we are engaged in torture at Guantanamo Bay. (Hey Dick, I know you just saw Star Wars but episode 1 was the phantom MENACE not memo!) We have no way of independently verifying this; we have to take tricky Dick`s word.

Why, pray tell, was an F.B.I.agent present during the torture of a prisoner at Gitmo? Doesn`t that strike anybody as odd? If I were engaged in torture, I certainly wouldn`t invite a civilian to watch. I would restrict it to other military personnel who would be under orders, and would be damn certain these military people were ones I could trust. I find it difficult to believe that our interrogation experts would be so careless as to allow a G-man to witness abuse of prisoners. Terrible incompetence there.