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'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").

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.

Nice job answering my questions last time.

OK, so you're getting a viagra-less woody over the President's recent decisions. Think of it this way:

The lawn jocky who you wouldn't allow in your country club if he wasn't carrying a broom now has the power to grab your ass off the stree, rape that lily white ass and cut your ball with razors in some offshore hell-hole, and then suppress the evidence of what he did and deny you your day in court.

You feelin' safer now, asshole.

Why do you hate our Constitution and the Republic under law which it established?

My questions were thus:

Shooter, do you have children?

I do. Can you imagine if one of them was raped in front of his mother, in order to get them to talk?

Do you have a conscience?

Are you Christian?

Are you even a human being?

I mean, lack of empathy or a conscience is a sign of severe mental illness. Or don't you believe in hell?

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their maker with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

Yes, shooter, even Arabs, even SUSPECTED terrorist, have rights, according to our founding document and the Enlightenment ideals it proudly stood for.

And if Hersh is lying, why not call him out and demand that all the documentary evidence is realeased? I mean, if there is nothing there to hide, why hide it? Didn't you make that same argument during the wiretapping debates--that if people have nothing to hide, why should they worry if their email is being

intecepted, even if it is a clear violation of the 4th Amendment? But I guess the Constitution isn't for the real world, any more than the Declaration is.