On Sunday I caught the Fareed Zacharia show because he sometimes goes against the grain of the MSM sunday talk fests--recently, he had a Congressman who actually disputed the idea of "the surge is working" and Zacharia also gave a platform to Freeman after his nomination was derailed. But yesterday, his panel for discussing the torture issue? Peggy Noonan, Jon Meacham and some other guy. When are these shows going to start reflecting the reality of who won the last two elections? When are we going to see people like Glenn giving their perspective on the Sunday talk shows? I'll send Zacharia an email but realistically, what can we do? Besides supporting the journalists we depend on? It's maddening...

I have a question: I work in a law firm and both the (very) Republican partner and the Democratic partner told me that Bybee, Yoo and Bradfield (?) cannot be prosecuted, that a lawyer can advise his client of anything and not be held responsible, even if the advice is to break the law. Can this possible be true? Does it make a difference that Bush, Cheney et al were not private clients but that the lawyers worked for us, the people (being Justice Department lawyers)...What about some kind of lawsuit on behalf of the People of the US? I'm so concerned that legal technicalities will mean people walk away from accountability on this ...One last thing--did I see that Obama and DOJ is trying to overturn the rule that police can't question someone without their lawyer being present even if they have asked for a lawyer? What's up with that?

You both have actually pinpointed the site of my confusion. I had seen an earlier post by Glenn where he referenced Kevin Jon Heller's take on the Nuremburg cases. Heller states that the "Justice Case," while it does not speak against holding lawyers accountable for giving "bad advice," doesn't hold for it either, so it isn't a strong precedent for finding Bybee et al guilty. Apparently the people convicted in the Ministries case were guilty of doing something beyond giving bad legal advice. Heller then cites the so-called "Ministry Case," where Nazis were convicted for giving erroneous legal advice to political superiors and says this is a much better precedent for prosecuting Bush admin figures.

I've heard it said that Yoo can't be found guilty because he truly believes that the president is above the law(due to his personal history in South Korea)--does this absolve him from the bad legal advice standard? Apparently, his briefs were horribly written and researched--hard to believe he is tenured at UC Berkeley. Anyway, I appreciate the explanations.

to everthing you have pointed out, Glenn, I have heard very little about Obama's nomination of Ignacio Moreno, top corporate counsel to GE and other Superfund polluters, as Assistant Attorney General for Environmental Affairs (!) at the DOJ and Obama's stated intention (this morning) to have Valerie Plame's civil suit dismissed on the grounds that she and her husband did not suffer any real damages from being outed. I think it's time to wake up and smell the coffee--the sooner people realize that Obama is not what we had hoped for and voted for, the sooner people can organize for some kind of third party solution to this sorry mess.

Isn't the Fed going to be run by a bunch of Goldman Sachs guys? Isn't this the proverbial case of the fox guarding the henhouse? What about the rating agencies who bear much responsibility for the current mess? Any mention of them? My impression is that Obama is just enabling the banks/Wall Street to keep control of the country and selling the middle class down the river...

Liberals "created" Pol Pot's genocidal crusade??? How about Nixon bombing northern Cambodia and driving Cambodians to support the Khmer Rouge. Reagan ended the Cold War? Please, anyone with half a brain knows that most of the impetus behind that came from Gorbachev. Liberals "created" the Iranian Revolution? Uh,no, that was thanks to the US overthrowing a democratically elected leader who proposed to nationalize Iran's oil fields and installing a murderous, torturing thug, the Shah of Iran. Yeah, right, another display of conservative concern for peoples' rights to self rule.

A few years ago, on a summer Sunday afternoon, I was driving with three friends to the New York Botanical Gardens. I am white, one friend was white, two friends were African-American middle aged women dressed in church outfits - they were even wearing church hats. We were pulled over by a police car and an officer came up and knocked on the rear window where I was sitting. When I lowered it, he asked me if everything was "all right." I said yes, everything was fine and he went back to the patrol car--I was so confused by the event that it didn't even occur to me until the police car pulled away that he had stopped us because, well, two of us were white and I guess he thought these church ladies had kidnapped us or something. There was an embarrassed silence in the car as we all realized why we had been stopped. I mean, two people couldn't BE more innocent-looking than these two ladies. But we still got stopped. The policeman was very polite, no one raised their voice but still, the depth of racism in this country, even on the part of well-meaning people, is really staggering. I don't blame Gates for being pissed off.