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Bah.

The case you're making for what amounts to a truth and reconciliation process is more or less valid for lower-level apparatchiks.

But the people - and I use the term loosely - at the top were not merely in the grip of a national psychosis, the way it can be argued that their apparatchiks (and the general population) were: The people at the top - Bush, Cheney, Yoo, Rumsfeld and the rest of their gang - were actively fomenting this public insanity for partisan gain.

They knew precisely what they were doing. They knew precisely how utterly insignificant a threat terrorism poses (compared to - say - the deaths caused by lack of universal access to flu vaccination in the USA, terrorism is barely even a rounding error). They knew precisely what the consequences of their decisions would be - Cheney went so far as to publicly joke about it. And the amount of back-side covering that went on at the time shows that they had a fairly shrewd notion of the legality (rather, the lack thereof) of their decisions.

So prosecute the top three or four layers of political appointees to the fullest extent of domestic and international law. Prosecute every rotten congresscritter who voted for these despicable crimes against humanity. Those convicted should have their personal property confiscated (all if it, including the kickbacks stashed in their Swiss bank accounts) and be sent to rot in a prison for a very long while.

And stop these self-serving exercises in excuse-making masquerading as columns and op-eds: The corporate press was either very much complicit, being played like a fiddle, or both. These persistent attempts to sweep the last eight years under the rug amount to nothing more than a disgraceful gambit to employ the bully pulpit to exonerate yourselves and all the known criminals and their enablers (present venue very much included) inside the Beltway.

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Fortunately, the comments over there seem pretty sane.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.