Assuming that the current round of warmonger pseudo-analysis of their mistakes can best humorously be analogized to the Monty Python "let's not bicker and argue over who killed who" (which applies with equal force to Dubya's current FISA immunity justifications), isn't this actually progress toward a cure?

After all, it is better than the "look, shiny, shiny Iran" explanations we've been hearing for a long time. Allowed to follow the sequence to rational conclusion, we might even see somebody apologize or even acknowledge that maybe the people who have been right all along ought to be listened to now.

Indeed, as one speaker actually perceives the possibility that maybe war is a pretty bad thing sometimes, perhaps there's a new gestalt on the neocon horizon....

But no, instead McCain actually gets corrected by Lieberman and, lo and behold, within 24 hours there are neocons insisting that the way their new Leader phrased it actually sounds pretty good to them. Yeah, that's the ticket....

So we are headed back to "shiny shiny", it would appear.

Somewhere out there our generation's Balzac -- Woody Allen -- has written a line that perfectly encompasses all this. For the life of me, though, I can't identify it right now.

It isn't so much that we destroyed all 115 bridges. That was so five years ago. But standing here, four years and nine months into the "post-mission accomplished" phase, how many of those 115 bridges have been rebuilt?

Greeted as liberators. Spreaders of democracy. Well, at least the oil flows.

Shameful.

That seems to be the defining distinction between Mr. Mukasey and Mr. Gonzales.

Yesterday, the US government released the text of John Yoo’s prescription and apologia for torture. Yoo wrote what his masters wanted to read, as a middle-level flunky. It’s disgusting on it’s face and I appreciate GG and everyone else's recognition and articulation of the myriad ways this is legally and morally the reality of Yoo’s analysis.

But Yoo’s memo became the legal justification for the operations of the United States Government.

And it happened in Secret. Took five years to become publicly available.

How can that happen? What laws were broken, and who broke them, to achieve this? Who should sit in a cell for a period of time – and at least lose their positions of “respect” and, for goodness sake, even “power” -- for causing the United States Government to torture people based upon a secret [disgracefully result-oriented and analytically unjustifiable, which is exactly why it was kept secret] memo?

The torture was and is disgusting. Al Capone’s undoubted murders were disgusting, too. But isn’t there something that can be done at the foundational level – is there no articulated provision of American law violated by clandestinely establishing a governmental policy of penal, military and international significance with no public awareness or accountability? Doing it in secret, fighting to maintain that secrecy? These people weren't petitioning the government for the redress of grievances, and they weren't formulating American law, these people were perpetrating a fraud.

Al Capone went to jail for tax evasion, but at least he was taken out of circulation. John Yoo is teaching potential lawyers at Boalt; David Addington walks around the White House.

Mukasey wasn't in the Administration when the event he "recalled" took place.

Rachel Maddow noted another aspect of this Mukasey disclosure that needs further examination: that is, was Mukasey’s comment an inadvertant “slip of the truth” by one of Bush’s minions who has come in well after the fact, somewhere been briefed about what actually has gone on but has been kept undisclosed, then forgot the playbook in a public forum and has let a cat out of a bag? Other examples would include John Negroponte’s recent confirmation that the Administration approved waterboarding — which hadn’t actually been actually admitted but shortly thereafter became a “yes we did and we’d do it again” talking point; or McConnell letting slip that the real motivation behind W’s FISA veto threats wasn’t “risk to Americans” but, rather, telecom immunity.

It’s a longstanding “good advice” lawyer admonition: you often tell your witness that it’s actually more practical and in your self-interest to tell the truth because the truth is the only story you don’t have to work to keep straight each time you tell it. The Bush administration keeps trying to remember its own lies, and that just can’t be done repetitively over time, particularly when the actors change.

These types of "slips" cry out for the initiation of full scale congressional investigations - they're happening more and more and somebody in the msm needs to notice them. It's not just Comey testifying about Ashcroft's bedside that is revealing, it's what these people say when they're trying to sell their soap that - "like the thirteenth chime of a crazy clock, which calls in question all those which came before" -- needs to be recognized and pursued.

Just checked in and reviewed a few pages on this...

Thank you, Amity, for the observations about the possibility of traction being achieved. An insightful and inspirational post.

Somehow, we're going to get back to where it isn't merely quaint to respect what's in the US Constitution, and where respect for the rule of law means something. GG helps a lot.