The wounds of outrage are fresh again. It's easy to forget, after all this time and all these other events - what a historically, globally colossal screw-up/crime it was to invade and occupy Iraq, ostensibly because it was a "threat" and had something vaguely to do with "terrorism."

What an unmitigated disaster and miscarriage of leadership and government, having almost singularly dwarfed every other occurrence since and so drastically altering the course of history and devastating the standing and well-being of the United States.

I know it's been said again and again, but sometimes reflecting on it still fills me with disbelief. The most stunning aspect of it, however, is not that it occurred, but that so many assumed it had to, in a fit of irrationality that luridly laid bare how tenuously this supposedly advanced country is perched on the howling brink of senseless self-destruction.

I wonder if the story will mutate in the future. Yet another reason to support investigations, I guess. But when the roll out to the Iraq War was going on, despite some pretty obvious clues, like Andy Card's comment about not rolling product out in August, it all looked like what the Ruth Marcus's and Jack Goldsmiths look like now.

It had the look and feel of a con job without central planning, like the corporate press was acting totally independent from the Adminstration, and so forth. Judith Miller and all that. But as time went on, Judith Miller ended up being a feed from Cheney via Libby, the 16 words ended up deliberate, and finally, this year, 5 years later, we got word that there had been a big, organized psyops program emanating from the Pentagon.

So one wonders about that now. Scott Horton made some pretty serious accusations against PBS and CNN on the 'ban' on saying that the Bush administration tortured.

http://www.fair.org/blog/2008/11/25/torture-in-the-abstract/

But there was also the putting off of Torturing Democracy until after January 20, 2009. And there was the mysterious deletion of 1 hour's material from the HBO drama Strip Search which aired briefly then disappeared, there was the extreme delay on Rendition and S.O.P. airing on premium channels and coming out on DVD (until October 2008), the attempted quash of Taxi to the Dark Side by Discovery Channel, followed by its postponement until this fall.

Is there a program we don't know about to maintain the silence and the drumbeat against prosecution? Wouldn't it take an investigation to find out? On other things, it's turned out to be more than just selfish corporate interests that supressed the truth. Is it so in this case too?

Mr. Gonzales was at a meeting in San Antonio the day of Mr. Comey's surprise testimony. "He didn't have the decency to notify anyone what he was about to testify," he said. "That was extremely disappointing." Mr. Comey declined to comment.

This guy was Attorney General?

"...the decency to notify anyone what he was about to testify..."

----

Gonzales then added he was as shocked as anyone to find out he had accompanied Andrew Card to confront Mr. Ashcroft at the hospital. "If Comey says I was there then who am I to contradict him, but this is news to me," Gonzales said when told originally about Comey's testimony.

"If he [Comey] had told me about this meeting earlier I think a lot of this mess could have been avoided," said Gonzales.

Numerous experts explained that surveillance and data mining can only give a partial picture Gonzales' schedule. "Patriotic Americans need to realize that they have a responsibility to inform public servants first before they start blabbing to congress," said many experts. "It's a matter of responsible disclosure," these experts continued, "People on the front line in the war on terror shouldn't have to find out who they had lunch with yesterday by reading a newspaper."

Gonzales explained, "If I was at the hospital shouldn't I be told that information before anyone else?"

MoveOn is a great group, but I fear they have become so enamored of Obama that they are losing their identity and punch. Obama already has an online community that dwarfs MoveOn (I think this is correct), and it is, naturally, also primarily concerned with supporting Obama's efforts in office.

They will remain important imo, but I wish they had not identified so completely with him. He already has lots of 'helpers'. He needs more 'pressurers'.

Same to you. (I think I am in that list of yours someplace)

That is not to say that I hold any hope at all that 2009 will not be the worst year for this country in a generation. And given the horrible times under Bush, the Butcher of Baghdad; that is saying a bunch. Eh?

Very true. Come to think of it, I have about five Obama bumper stickers, and several Obama pins - all free from MoveOn. :)

They've essentially become his mass marketing tool.

Apologize for all the movie titles without italics. And for forgetting Phil Donahue and the Katie Couric outburst about pressure from above.

And for failing to finish: What I'm asking is why it is so easy to believe in the complicity of telecoms and the presence of a military psyops program, but not wonder if there has been complicity from media companies and another possible psyops program from the intelligence community?

being a Democrat at heart,

i probably start out by giving the benefit of the doubt to anything Democrats say, and many times just go along

i wonder if the same can be said for Republicans?

marc

Then you do it. No voting, just your list with your categories and your picks. The food critic here in my town can do it: so I know you can.

And, I would like to read your list. No, really, I would.

Kohlberg's stages of moral development, adapted for the Bush administration:

In Stage one (obedience and punishment driven), individuals focus on the direct consequences that their actions will have for themselves. For example, an action is perceived as morally wrong if the person who commits it gets punished. "the last time I [committed a war crime] I got [prosecuted] so I will not do it again" The worse the punishment for the act is, the more 'bad' the act is perceived to be.

No punishment means that the act wasn't "wrong". To the contrary, having committed an act that was criticized as being wrong and gotten away it without punishment, it would be edifying to the perpetrator. With a long list of avoiding any consequences for bad behavior, at least as it would be judged for most others, Bush (and many in his administration) have learned that getting away with it is 10 tenths of the law.

This can give rise to an inference that even innocent victims are guilty in proportion to their suffering. In addition, there is no recognition that others' points of view are any different from one's own view. This stage may be viewed as a kind of authoritarianism.

This interpretation certainly seems to fit the patterns of "thinking" Bush, and others, applied to the non-combatants and civilian casualties from the war on terror.

Hypocrisy is a predictable, and indeed logical, consequence of these stages of moral reasoning. Since the mainstream media has abandoned the role of challenging power, it seems fitting that the watchdog of democracy has enabled the wanton brazenness of the extreme right that has manifest in blatant crimes it condemns in others.

The domestic challenges currently facing the United States seem to me so daunting that I fear there will be little in the way of resolve to tackle the moral rot of most of the political class, the corruption of most of the political system and the prosecution of the many Democrats and Republicans who are responsible for these egregious crimes. Should they be swept under the table, as Sunstein and Marcus advocate, I wonder if there will be a guilty acknowledgment of what has passed and a subsequent maturation of American politics, or if it will not further encourage and fuel the extreme right to continue wrecking a great nation.