I heard a chunk of Bishop Tutu's grilling of former Security officials in front of the Truth and reconcilliation Commission in South Africa. Let us be clear: he was there to expose these crimes and publically shame the criminals. Does Conason think that, like Tutu, Senators are going to read from formerly sectret documents describing the deaths or injuries of torture victims later found to have done nothing wrong while Cheney and Bush sit their and squirm? Joe C., you believe that'll happen? Really? Because that would be the only way this process could be justified. If these men were subjected to a ritualized humilation and a public airing or ALL their crimes, I might consider it in lieu of prosecution. But since that won't happen, I say we let justice take its course, and Obama release all relevant documents and let the chips fall where they may.

If you haven't noticed reading GG's column and the MANY letters here, almost anhybody here who is "on the Left" is pissed off beyond words at Obama and the Dems for their lack of courage and conviction. NOB, stop mistaking moderate Dems like Obama, Pelosi, and Reid for "the Left." I'm on "the Left" and despite your idiotic fever dreams, they are NOT.

all in a war you had no right under any law of God or man to start. Then you sat back while the ethnic cleansing happened, insisgting that Iraq was NOT in a civil war. Then, as the ethnic cleansing petered out, you started buying off the people who had been shooting at you with money and guns. Then you sent a shitload of extra GIs over and claimed that they were the reason the violence was ebbing. And now, somehow, you want to claim that this equates with "winning"?

Joan, what kind of amoral asshole are you? What', invading other coungtries and killing thousands of civilians is a no-lose, no-foul situation? Murder and illegality are "redeemed" by success? As an historian, I guess that I will be fighting this sick, evil claim for decades to come. Murder, torture, and destruction are all OK, I guess, if we can somehow claim to have "won." Whoopty-shit, folks--Americans are more depraved then I had imagined.

...to fight yet another war against by far the most formidable enemy we will have faced since Vietnam? Doesn't anyone anymore read Clausewitz? Don't they get it that no war can be won unless you have a clear political goal that can be attained at a cost worth paying? By Perle's own logic, won't the Iranians be forced to retaliate by any means at their disposal if their people are being bombed and killed by foreigners? What does he imagine they will do, shit themselves and cry "uncle"? If they are the fanatics he claims they are, won't they strike back with everythign they've got and resort to any nasty tactic they can in retaliation for an attack on their land and people?

A whole swath of the American foreign policy establishment is either derranged or pathological.

Hitler might have won that one, or fought the world to a draw. He had the power of the world's second most potent military machine at his beck and call. He was able to start a war that killed 54 million people, and drive the Jews of Europe towards extinction. The Taliban shitheads and all their allies can't come close to that.

As someone who thinks Sharia law is oppressive nonsense and that the Pakistani government is obliged to fight it (it's their country and their people and their fight, not ours) I am all in favor of reminding people how lousy things are in large swaths of the Muslim world (including most of Afghanistan, a country we supposedly "liberated" ho-ho), but just as Christians had to stop massacring each other and buring witches at the stake after 1648, Muslims will have to stumble towards modernity at their own pace and in their own way. I'd say if we told Pakistani Intelligence and the pakistani military that we were cutting off all their military aid and monitoring their other aid and loans like hawks if they didn't push back against this nastiness, they'd get off their duffs and suppress these throwbacks.

We know that CIA officials at one point were weird or perverted enough to tape rendition victims being tortured in third party prisons. But I seriously doubt if much of the evidence of wrongdoing survived the Bush-Obama Interregnum. Like Mai Li (forgive me fogetting proper spelling there) we need a few angry GIs or Spooks to step forward and tell what they saw.

Those men had incredible guts, but also the US Army was tupid enough to bring some of them up on charges for tryting to stop the massacre! So, they had an incentive to talk as well. Those guys who bore witness to truth got nothing from a less than grateful country; they were ignored, and their tales shrugged off as "an isolated incident." Would Congress today act any differently? Will Obama cough up the secret documents if any have survived the shredder and the delete button? We'll know if the nation is back on track or not as and when those questions get answered.

A couple of months back, I heard a spate of rumors that many government officials were just waiting for Bush to leave office so that they could spill the beans on what they saw as criminal wrongdoing and abhorent behavior under the last regime.

I'm still waiting for these people to come forward. And I'm afraid that the Obama Administration is not sending them the right message. With so many government documents lost already, and Establishment loyalists I'm sure getting rid of more as we speak, it will take the concerted efforts of several credible whistleblowers to get to the bottom of what happened over th last eight years. Cross your fingers that they have not been scared into silence (or even, we might speculate, been silenced).