And I quote: "However, only reality will change the minds of those you are fighting with. When they see that the current administration is not much different than the last on the important issues of foreign policy and civil rights then they may start awakening"

But how real does real have to be? The United States is still massively wealthy and extremely powerful. Like the Roman Empire, we can take all kinds of shocks along the periphery and still keep going back in Italy as if nothing has changed. America has a vast geographic and wealth cushion to absorb calamities--we are right now fobbing off the bill for our horrendous overconsumption on the Chinese (buying bonds that are worth less given inflation and the depreciation of the dollar than their face value) and our children (in the form of a huge national debt). And even if the families of those we have tortured and those we have killed could in some way strike back, the people you speak of at the Huffington Post cannot and will not process their actions as payback for our torture, rendition, murder, and missile and bombing strikes.

The Left long ago sold itself on the Enlightenment project that reason and evidence should decide right and wrong. Such thinking has been, and remains, a minority interpretation of reality in a world where faith and magical thinking are still in many ways the norm. As is evident on this board, we may "prove" to the satisfaction of anyone who is relatively objective and takes evidence seriously that crimes have been committed and that law and justice demands that those crimes be punished. But I fear, more and more, that our criteria for judging these things holds little sway over man minds.

I've heard people repeatedly say Obama is doing this for bi-partisn gain, but what support has he gotten from any block of Republicans in Congress, or in the media, for all his backtracking and sell-outs? I mean, he's given the bankers and the investor class a blank check, the military industrial complex all the money it could want, and the spooks immunity from prosecution for torturing and killing people. And what has he gotten in compensation for these sell-outs of the people who voted for him and "change"? Can anyone answer that (other than the conspiracy-laden "not a bullet in his brain").

I've worked in the archives in the UK. If you want to know what's happening now, or for the past twenty years or so, forget about it. But if you want to know what was going on fifty or sixty years back, the British are better at producing the documents, and they are NEVER redacted. I have never seen a document with parts blacked out. You get it or you don't and usually after 50 years (although some documents I've seen were stamped with "Release after 100 years" on them but were released sooner). I can learn alot more about what MI6 was doing in 1949 than I can about what the CIA was doing back then.

I mean, the Constitution vest the power to set up all courts below the Supreme Court in the CONGRESS, but that would imply that this lying sack gave a damn what the Constitution said.

Let's face it: the government has acted in such illegal and immoral ways that they can no longer even have a hope in hell of convicting dead-on guilty people in any honest court anywhere. So they need dishonest courts. So Obama will supply us with them, stocked with serving military officers who have lost friends and subordinates, in our imperial shenanigans, are predisposed to think of those dragged before them as enemies, and are under no illusion that they are expected by their superiors to hand down gulity verdicts.

Pragmatism at its best! Or, should I say, ugly, amoral expediency.

As you should have noticed from the comments below what I had clearly placed in quotes. I appreciate the good work you do here, but you should have read the whole thing before you reemed me for saying what I didn't say.

"Are you seriously suggesting uncut audio/video footage of rape and sodomy should be displayed over the airwaves accessible to billions of homes worldwide with the very real possibility that children will view them?"

If given a choice between my children seeing this offal, and my children growing up in a country where these things are done in their name with impunity, I'd take the risk my kids see it and pray for my country to witness these alleged atrocities and act accordingly. I see no other way for this stain to be purged than for us as a people to come clean and atone for what I was brought up to believe are sins.

Let me be blunt: does anybody really need to see those horrific pictures that came out of Buchenwald or Dachau? Would you spare us by taking them out of history books and replacing them with written descriptions? Don't you think that the power of those images, and the fact that Germans were forced to tour the camps and witness what was done, helped to make it unlikely that shit like that would ever happen in that nation again? And that everyone everywhere would all be damn sure that it did happen, and who was responsible? I mean, Bush killed his tens of thousand, and Hitler his millions, so they are not close to being equivalent. But we are a democracy, and they were a dictatorship. We are supposed to have higher standards. Do you really believe that the American people will be as convinced of the horror of what happened, I mean if rape was employed, if we release a written description which will NOT be repeated verbatim on the news or printed in full in most newspapers, if anybody still reads newspapers? Will that have the impact we need it to have if these things are ever going to be repudiated and punished? Think about it.