Courtesy of John Cole at Balloon Juice, who credits the original discovery to Andrew Sullivan, this is too good not to post, even though I’m so busy I can scarcely sit down. Sullivan writes:

“Waterboarding was sometimes used in the Deep South to torture African-Americans and to extract false confessions to alleged crimes. And when it emerged in an appeal as long ago as 1926, even the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled it categorically “a specie of torture well known to the bench and bar of the country,” and “barbarous.” They over-turned a guilty verdict for murder by an African-American man against a white man because such methods invalidated any notion of a reliable confession… ”
A “Christian” president, his “Christian” and “patriotic” supporters, and even his alleged political opposition such as California’s Senator Diane Feinstein and New York’s Senator Charles Schumer seem to be operating at the moral level of the Ku Klux Klan, many of whom were also people of “substance” and “respect” in the benighted places they made home. Bush, Schumer, Feinstein, and the rest of that repellent crowd are not worthy to shine the shoes of Mississippi’s Supreme Court justices of 1926.