Olbermann: Mr. Bush, "We're better than you"

Keith Olbermann's Special Comment Monday night dipped into the proscribed lexicon--the words that the Media Insiders are forbidden to use--in describing Bush and the end of Daniel Levin's career in the Justice Department.

The canon of impermissible journalistic language includes:

• "criminal conspiracy to save the ass of George W. Bush"
• "liar"
• "screwed"
• "wouldn't just mean impeachment"
• "going to prison"

The story, broken three years after the event by ABC News, has been unsurprisingly missing from the mainstream news media radar screen, but in two sentences, it's this:

1. In 2004, then Acting Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin, in order to form a judgment about whether waterboarding, among other interrogation techniques, constituted torture and was therefore illegal under American and international law, subjected himself under controlled conditions to waterboarding at a military base near Washington DC.


2. Even knowing that his ultimate safety was assured by the experts monitoring his condition, Levin found the experience of incrementally drowning so terrifying that he put his professional opinion--"torture is abhorrent"--in a Justice Department memorandum, shortly after the dissemination of which he was forced out of his job by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Here's Olbermann's comment:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Transcript here.

No wonder Olbermann has been deemed no longer safe for basic cable.