The deal, brokered by Africa Union chairman President Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania and Mr Kofi Annan, will see the creation of a grand coalition sharing power according to party strength in Parliament.

The deal provides that the PM will coordinate and supervise Ministers, while Cabinet positions will be shared proportionally according to party strength in Parliament.

The President will have the authority to sack Cabinet members, but only with written agreement from leaders of the respective coalition party.

The Cabinet will comprise the President, the Vice-President, the Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Ministers and Ministers.

The coalition will collapse at the end of the current Parliament, or if the parties so agree, or if one partner withdraws.

The Air Force is tightening restrictions on which blogs its troops can read, cutting off access to just about any independent site with the word "blog" in its web address. It's the latest move in a larger struggle within the military over the value -- and hazards -- of the sites. At least one senior Air Force official calls the squeeze so "utterly stupid, it makes me want to scream."

I think that Democrats have much less to fear this time. Nader's candidacy means something quite different in 2008 than it does in 2000. In 2000, Nader was one of several factors that put George W. Bush in the White House. And in fairness to him, he was only one factor.

My guess is that there is very little chance that Nader will decide the outcome of the 2008 election; he will probably have very small numbers, as he did in 2004. Third parties who do not quickly displace one of the two major parties (as the Republicans displaced the Whigs in the 1850s) tend not to wear well on repeated attempts.

Rather, if Nader has any significance in this election, it will be to push certain issues on the table, and force the candidates to address them. To do that, he would have to be a much more significant presence than he is likely to be. Nader is quite interested in pushing the corruption issue-- and the connections between corporate lobbying and Washington politics-- but public interest in that issue is by now overdetermined.

In the 2000 election, Nader represented the left's displeasure as much with Clintonism as with Republican politics. Nader's assertion that there was no difference between the two candidates in 2000 was premised on the idea that Gore would prove to be as much of an accommodator of conservative Republicans as Clinton had been and that, like Clinton, Gore would accept the framing of political issues and political possibilities in a Republican dominated age. That is, Nader ran against the accomodationist model of Democratic electoral success that Clinton had perfected.

It is worth noting that many Democrats now agree with Nader that this model is outmoded, and their preference for something more has created problems for Hillary Clinton's candidacy.

Bill Clinton's model of Democratic electoral success, whatever its political advantages, had two unfortunate side effects. One was a strongly chastened sense of what politics could do-- at least with respect to the progressive agenda. The second is that with the President and Congress converging on a fair number of issues-- like balanced budgets and welfare reform-- Republicans turned to the politics of scandal as the best technique for undermining the Democratic electoral strategy, and Bill Clinton was only too happy to help them out.

We will never know if Gore would have followed in Clinton's footsteps as a clever accommodator of Reaganism: he was certainly not as agile a politician as Clinton, and Vice-Presidents following successful two term presidents (Van Buren, George H.W. Bush) have not fared well. Perhaps most important, the 9/11 attacks reshaped the focus of American politics to foreign policy.

Gore would probably have had a different presidency than Bush, and many of his policies would have been different. Without a chorus of neoconservatives in the White House, the chances of an Iraq war in response to 9/11 would have been small. However Gore would have faced a very conservative and partisan Republican-controlled Congress following a bitterly contested election, and that Congress would not have been in much of a mood for cooperation. Gore might have served only one term, and the Republicans might have retained control of Congress.

With Bush in the White House instead, the President took the nation into an unnecessary war and a disastrous foreign policy blunder, the Republican coalition underwent enormous strains, and the Democrats retook both houses of Congress.

If Nader is responsible for Bush's Presidency, then, he is responsible not only for the havoc Bush created but also the Democrats' enviable political position today. It is an irony of history, but history is often ironical in precisely this way. Nader in 2008 may now be largely irrelevant, but that is because in 2000 Nader did his small part in in setting in motion the events that led to the political downfall of the Republican Party and the dissolution of the Reagan coalition. And with the end of the Reagan coalition, the reactive Clintonian strategy of triangulation, co-opation of Republican themes and deliberate chastening of progressive aspirations may seem unnecessary; indeed, the end of the Reagan coalition may give way to a new form of politics far more hospitable to liberalism and progressive values. Democrats who blame Nader for putting Bush in the White House will probably give Nader little credit for that, but it probably pleases Nader a great deal.

The old theory was that there were abstract principles of justice, which, although they were not embodied in the organic law of a State, might be referred to for the purpose of deciding whether the will of the legislature might be overruled in some particular instance. The new theory is that certain doctrines of a particular school of political economists are impliedly, if not expressly, recognized as sound by the constitution, and may therefore be utilized to elucidate and further the intention of the framers.

If the term is to make any sense at all, it may be useful to separate out two different concerns. The first is the fear that charismatic leaders who inspire patriotic fervor and strongly emotional bonds of loyalty will produce authoritarian policies that people overlook because of their emotional connection to the leader and his claims to represent the national interest. That is the Stalinist implication of the term "cult of personality." And that is what people hint at when they use the term pejoratively. If so, then the real question to ask when the term is deployed is whether the speaker is claiming that politician's policies are or are likely to become authoritarian. Of course, people generally recoil from using the "A" word, but that's what's at stake. When I have used the term "cult of personality" in reference to George W. Bush, I have been invoking these concerns about his policies. Is *that* what people are worried about in the case of Barack Obama? If so, then they should say so directly.

However, there is a second concern that may actually be more important given the current features of American politics: the cult of personality around our leaders refers to the increasing disconnect between the politics of leadership (the methods of gaining and retaining power) and the actual mechanisms of governance.

Democracies tend to rally around charismatic figures; media culture organized around television tends to promote this because it makes character and appeals to character particularly important. People gain office through displays of charisma and appeals to character, seeking the right to rule by acclimation of the public. Yet once the leader takes office, the actual governance of the country is in the hands of large bureaucratic institutions like administrative agencies, the military, the intelligence services, and so on. When the new President takes office on a tide of acclimation and optimism, he inevitably promises what someone else will be delivering.

This is a distinct problem from Caesarism and creeping authoritarianism. The problem is that people are distracted from the way governance actually occurs because it is easier for them (and the press) to focus on personalities of leaders. To say that contemporary politicians form cults of personality means to say that they distract the public from the mechanisms of governance because that is how they gain the authority to rule. The problem is that if this authority does not translate into the ability to move the system forward, it is delusory and will, in time, breed cynicism and despair and successive waves of charistmatic politics each promising much but delivering little.

The long term fear about such a situation is that eventually electoral politics will become a sideshow to the actual forces that govern the nation, or, in the alternative, that popular discontent will grow so great that eventually a charismatic and unscrupulous leader will attempt to seize actual control of the methods of governance and rule by decree, thus ending democracy. This concern is not about any particular politician, but rather about the sustainability of popular sovereignty and the long term health of democratic republics. The framers of the American Constitution were worried that democracies eventually collapse and turn into dictatorships; that is why they tried to design a republican system of government that would make it difficult for power to be concentrated in the hands of any one person. (Their vision of the Presidency, it is worth noting, was very different from today's conception.) This larger question-- the long term sustainability of republican government in the face of changing circumstances and tendencies toward charismatic politics-- is probably not much on the minds of pundits and commentators who go on about "cults of personality," but it is probably more important than the question of whether either Obama's or Clinton's supporters are too loyal for the commentator's taste.

[T]he "water cure" admits of several variants:

(a) pumping: filling a stomach with water causes the organs to distend, a sensation compared often with having your organs set on fire from the inside. This was the Tormenta de Toca favored by the Inquisition and featured on your website photo. The French in Algeria called in the tube or tuyau after the hose they forced into the mouth to fill the organs.

(b) choking - as in sticking a head in a barrel. It is a form of near asphyxiation but it also produces the same burning sensation through all the water a prisoner involuntarily ingests. This is the example illustrated in the Battle of Algiers movie, a technique called the sauccisson or the submarine in Latin America. Prisoners describe their chests swelling to the size of barrels at which point a guard would stomp on the stomach forcing the water to move in the opposite direction.

(c) choking - as in attaching a person to a board and dipping the board into water. This was my understanding of what waterboarding was from the initial reports. The use of a board was stylistically most closely associated with the work of a Nazi political interrogator by the name of Ludwig Ramdor who worked at Ravensbruck camp. Ramdor was tried before the British Military Court Martial at Hamburg (May 1946 to March 1947) on charges for subjecting women to this torture, subjecting another woman to drugs for interrogation, and subjecting a third to starvation and high pressure showers. He was found guilty and executed by the Allies in 1947.

(d) choking - as in forcing someone to lie down, tying them down, then putting a cloth over the mouth, and then choking the prisoner by soaking the cloth. This also forces ingestion of water. It was invented by the Dutch in the East Indies in the 16th century, as a form of torture for English traders. More recently it was common in the American south, especially in police stations, in the 1920s, as documented in the famous Wickersham Report of the American Bar Association (The Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement, 1931), compiling instances of police torture throughout the United States.

[T]hose of you who know me will know that I am both enamored of my own toughness and prone to hyperbole. The former, I feel that I am justifiably proud of. The latter may be a truth in many cases, but this is the simple fact:

It took me ten minutes to recover my senses once I tried this. I was shuddering in a corner, convinced I narrowly escaped killing myself.

Here's what happened:

The water fills the hole in the saran wrap so that there is either water or vaccum in your mouth. The water pours into your sinuses and throat. You struggle to expel water periodically by building enough pressure in your lungs. With the saran wrap though each time I expelled water, I was able to draw in less air. Finally the lungs can no longer expel water and you begin to draw it up into your respiratory tract.

It seems that there is a point that is hardwired in us. When we draw water into our respiratory tract to this point we are no longer in control. All hell breaks loose. Instinct tells us we are dying.

I have never been more panicked in my whole life. Once your lungs are empty and collapsed and they start to draw fluid it is simply all over. You [b]know[b] you are dead and it's too late. Involuntary and total panic.

There is absolutely nothing you can do about it. It would be like telling you not to blink while I stuck a hot needle in your eye.

At the time my lungs emptied and I began to draw water, I would have sold my children to escape. There was no choice, or chance, and willpower was not involved.

I never felt anything like it, and this was self-inflicted with a watering can, where I was in total control and never in any danger.

And I understood.

Waterboarding gets you to the point where you draw water up your respiratory tract triggering the drowning reflex. Once that happens, it's all over. No question.

Some may go easy without a rag, some may need a rag, some may need saran wrap.

Once you are there it's all over.

I didn't allow anybody else to try it on me. Inconceivable. I know I only got the barest taste of what it's about since I was in control, and not restrained and controlling the flow of water.

But there's no chance. No chance at all.

So, is it torture?

I'll put it this way. If I had the choice of being waterboarded by a third party or having my fingers smashed one at a time by a sledgehammer, I'd take the fingers, no question.

It's horrible, terrible, inhuman torture. I can hardly imagine worse. I'd prefer permanent damage and disability to experiencing it again. I'd give up anything, say anything, do anything.

The Spanish Inquisition knew this. It was one of their favorite methods.

It's torture. No question. Terrible terrible torture. To experience it and understand it and then do it to another human being is to leave the realm of sanity and humanity forever. No question in my mind.

SCALIA: It seems to me, you have to say, as unlikely as that is, it would be absurd to say that you, you, can, I don’t know, something under the fingernails, smack him in the face – it’d be absurd to say that you can’t do that. And once you acknowledge that, we’re into a different game. How close does the threat have to be, and how severe can the infliction of pain be? I don’t think these are easy questions at all, in either direction. But I certainly know that you can’t come in, smugly and, and, uh, with great self-satisfaction and say, “Oh, it’s torture, and therefore, it’s, it’s, uh, no good.” You would not apply that in some real-life situations. It may not be a ticking bomb in Los Angeles, but it may be, “Where is this group that we know is plotting some very painful action against the United States? Where are they and what are they currently planning?"

BBC: If you look at countries with a common law tradition, of which we are one, and you are another, but also, lots of other countries around the world, and in the developing world – if they look at decision of the Supreme Court which affirm the death penalty, and which perhaps affirm torture, although that hasn’t happened yet, does that not set a moral tone?

SCALIA: Well, I urge them not to do that. I don’t look to their law. Why should they look to mine? I don’t purport to be prescribing some universal moral law. I am interpreting the meaning of the text of my Constitution, which was adopted at a certain time by my people, and had a meaning to those people at the time. That’s all I’m doing. I’m not charged with, with figuring out the content of the natural law. If you want to look at our decisions, what you could derive from it is what a wonderful Constitution we have. Or, if you don’t like it, you can say what a terrible Constitution we have. But we don’t pretend to be moral, you know, some Western mullahs, who what decide what is right and wrong for the whole world.