1115.org

Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples is — still, at the time I write this — the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. What he is not is a team player.

He was up on Capitol Hill yesterday, giving testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, when he was asked about waterboarding. A routine question, which did not exactly elicit the routine response:

Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) asked, “General, do you believe that waterboarding is consistent with Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions?”

After pausing a moment to think, Maples replied, “No, sir, I don’t.”

“Do you think it’s humane?” Levin asked.

“No, sir, I think it would go beyond that bound.”

Not an if or a but. No hint of equivocation or parsing. How did this man ever come to be director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in the time of Bush?

I suspect we are about to find out why Gen. Maples doesn’t know the first damn thing about this subject. (Hint: he’s not a lawyer, is he?)

(If you’d like to be thoroughly depressed, do a Google News search for “Michael D. Maples” waterboarding. I did one at 5:30 am PST and found this. Yes, that’s 4 hits, only one of which refers to his testimony yesterday, and that one’s from a blog, not a regular media outlet. I guess nobody heard this tree fall in the forest, apart from subversive bloggers and their crazed readers.)