Glenn,

I first saw you on Bill Moyers, a few weeks ago.

I feel yours is the most articulate voice for human rights and freedoms in America, among Internet journalists.

In total agreement with you, I think that the total record of

constitutional infringement of the last eight years must be annulled and then human rights and traditional democratic freedoms must be reestablished and GUARANTEED. It is important to reflect how that can be done.

Constitutional checks and balances must be reset and clearly defined.

Private armies must be abolished.

Torture must be banned.

Individual privacy must be reestablished at all levels.

Illegal detention must be totally halted.

Regulators must be put back in place.

Undue religious influence in the bureaucracy must be eliminated.

The main culprits - a substantial number, alas - ought to be prosecuted and punished for anti-constitutional acts and grand larceny...

Something like a French or American revolution, hopefully in a velvet version, diplomatically handled, are called for.

Glenn, that's where we are. Immense issues are at stake.

Thank you for your alert civic conscience.

The facts outlined by Juan Cole have been known since 2002.

Why is it that only in the very last waning days of the Bush administration, mainstream media such as Salon dares to lay them out and connect the dotted lines, so to speak?

What kind of restraint or fear has dominated, that has prevented the logical exposition of such crucial issues as the neo-con Middle East conspiracy, in media such as Salon, when reality cried out for a change of policy course?

The whole North American continent has lived for eight years in various degrees of fear to practice elementary press freedom - and we now see what huge losses, even in monetary terms - this has entailed in every domain of life.

The legacy of the great poet and champion of freedom John Milton in Areopagitica, or of John Stuart Mill in

On Liberty refers to central role of freedom of expression and rejecting censorship - and self-censorship - as a way to strengthen the body politic. It has been at the core of the Anglo-Saxon tradition. But an insidious fear has taken hold and this great tradition is almost on the way of being lost.

Let's hope that freedom of the media, of the press, of expression, make a comeback, in spite of stubborn and insidious official or officious intimidation.

Only energetic prosecution and punishment will deter the repetition of such crimes.

I try to make a list of these crimes: they are so numerous that many of them keep escaping me.

It has been a coup d'etat - a Gelichschaltung as in Nazi Germany.

Make sure it doesn't happen again: God gave you one chance- seize it!

How many Irakis were killed and you didn't mention it?

A million + ... A million and a half - maybe?

How many Afghanis?

Hundreds of thousands?

Did all these people have to die?

Why did you at Salon and elsewhere have to wait till today to start connecting the dots?

Maybe, as long as house prices were rising - and the stock market along with them - there was a tacit deal:

we are giving up our freedom, we are shutting our eyes

and let the administration do as it pleases... clap, clap!

With the rising figure of American war casualties, and house and stock prices plummeting ... voters remembered there existed a constitution, a Bill of Rights, that there is perhaps a public responsibility which is more than a bunch of private, egomaniac, frankly psychopathic interests.(There isn't such a thing as society, said Mrs. Thacher)

Maybe principles count only after the public's pockets are hit.

What attitudes... Should we call it almost suicidal

hypocrisy?

Not to forget how the Calvinist New-Born-led religious alliance (Robertson, Weyrich, Falwell, Hagee and many other charismatic crooks and opportunists...) has infiltrated American national life, junking separation between church and state. They controlled the agenda. Montesquieu and the Founding Fathers of the republic must be howling in their graves.

How many thousands of civil servants have been sacked to make room for religious fanatics appointed to civil service jobs. For how long will the religious appointees imprint their wacko absurd agenda and sabotage reason and modern sense?

Even Time magazine used to schmooze about "Rapture" and the end of time.

Then the New-Born fanatics wanted to convert Irak to Christianity. They sent missionaries to Irak touted by Time magazine.

The result? Islamic fundamentalists are killing and are chasing out the Christians of Irak, who have lived there since early Christian times.

That'is what one gets when one allows the taking over of the state by religious intolerant fanatics.

Obama should ponder how to prevent the deleterious religious tide in the future.

Torture was prohibited by the French revolution.

Count Cesare Beccaria, an 18th century Italian legal philosopher

had already impassionedly argued that torture was not only immoral, but ineffective.

Now, the so-called post-modern principle of the reversibility of historical progress was applied assiduously and almost to the letter by gothic and grotesque administration reactionaries. And yet, if there was one hallmark of the Middle Ages that Enlightenment philosophers such as Voltaire unequivocally rejected, it was torture.

Why should we go back to medieval practice now?

Why should we follow base urges instead of refined and sophisticated intelligence developed through historical moral struggle?