omooex: If you're saying that its understandable to be cowed by jingoism and to trust the government implicitly, then I don't know where you're coming from.

I'm coming from a perspective of about 5000 years of history.

The stakes are too high to expect so little from our people. And I would just add, that by any measure, the arguments put forth by our government and their journalist enablers have been absurd from the start.

Quite true. But that didn't stop 70% of "our people" from wholeheartedly backing the invasion of Iraq. After all, Saddam was going to attack us with remote-controlled model planes and he might have given weapons he didn't have to people that he didn't trust and who thoroughly despised him. Not to mention the fact that the government and their journalist enablers constantly pushed the connection between Saddam and the 9/11 attacks. You severely underestimate the extent to which people in a combination of a patriotic fervor and paralytic fear are willing to act against their own stated beliefs and their own best interests. And to a certain extent, yes, I don't think the majority of Americans expected their president to lie to them quite so blatantly about something quite so important.

One could almost say that they require a "willing" suspension of disbelief. To call their rhetoric transparent and baseless would be a compliment. My original point: historians looking back will have no choice but to assume that we chose to do nothing. Nothing being, our (as a nation) insisting on ignorance.

Or indifference. I'd be willing to wager that if you asked 100 people whether America's greatest problem was ignorance or apathy the most common answer would be "I don't know and I don't care." The thing about history is that every generation rewrites history to fulfill or justify its own needs. About the only thing about history that most agree on, apart from it's being an agreed-upon fiction, is that it is written by the winners. Your view of future history seems to imply that it will be written by the Chinese.

February 2003: Only 27% opposed military action, the smallest percentage since the polls began in April of 2002.

April 2003: A poll conducted by the Washington Post and ABC News found that 72% of Americans supported the Iraq War, despite finding no evidence of chemical or biological weapons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_popular_opinion_on_invasion_of_Iraq

Q.E.D.

Denning: NYT is reporting today that former AG Alberto Gonzales is having a hard time finding a job at any law firm.

And he can't even claim unemployment benefits because he wasn't fired, he quit.

See also http://thinkprogress.org/2008/04/12/alberto-gonzales-unable-to-find-work/

But apparently both Yoo and E-man believe that the founders visualized the United States as a military dictatorship and intentionally wrote that vision into our Constitution.

C-hag: The discussions of Nazis here is more than usually relevant in this case, if only because the so-called "intellectuals" of that era were among the first rounded up, and it seems that their modern counterparts are actively trying to avoid that fate, at whatever cost to their legitimacy or place in history.

The discussions of Nazis here is even more relevant than that because after the main trial of the "principals" (there's that word again) war criminals there were other trials one of which was known as the "Justice Trial" (United States v. Altstoetter, et al. http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/cntrl10_trials.htm#Justice) in which lawyers and jurists were charged with crimes very similar in nature to those of Yoo:

The indictment charged that the defendants in the Ministry of Justice had participated in drafting and enacting unlawful orders and decrees, such as those which discriminated against Poles, Jews, and others in occupied territory, and the notorious "Nacht und Nebel" (Night and Fog) decree under which civilians in the occupied territories were spirited away to Germany for secret trial before special "courts."

I agree that Yoo should not be scapegoated, and also that he is entitled to a fair trial, but his trial really should just be a sideshow to the main event which, like Nuremberg, should be that of the "principals".