By week's end, the evidence that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and other top government officials had deliberately created a system of torture which they knew was illegal – indeed, a capital crime – under U.S. law was so plain, so overwhelming, and so handily concentrated that it broke through the levees of institutional cover-up and media complicity that had held this clear truth at bay for so long. The grim facts had finally worked their way into "conventional wisdom." It was now permissible for good "centrist" folk to speak of such things, even condemn them, without being automatically relegated to ranks of "the haters," the "unserious," the "shrill partisans," etc.

And yet, even as this new consensus was forming, you could see the sandbags piling up in the background to make sure that the water didn't reach too far. A line of defense was being laid that would allow the purveyors of conventional wisdom to vent a bit of righteous outrage at official wrongdoing without actually having to do anything about it or admitting of any flaws in their fundamentalist doctrine of American exceptionalism. No one need take any risks, make any effort, or discomfort themselves in any way to rectify the injustice; indeed, even the perpetrators should be left undisturbed. Instead, our uniquely good and smooth-running political system will magically make everything all better, and somehow prevent the bad things from happening again. [More] . . read more

From True Blue Liberal By Sherwood Ross

Since it invaded Iraq in 2003, the U.S. has detained thousands of juveniles-some of whom were tortured and sexually abused, according to published reports. Figures of the number of children behind bars vary. Some estimates put the number as high as 6,000.

It is now an incontrovertible fact, known all over the world, that George W. Bush and his regime lied through their teeth in order to launch wars of aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq, and that the Bush regime is doing the same thing again in hopes of launching an attack on Iran.

As a consequence of Bush’s lies, there are a million dead Iraqis, mostly women and children, and four million displaced Iraqis, 4,100 dead American soldiers and tens of thousands of seriously wounded. No one knows how many dead in Afghanistan. And there is the ongoing Israeli slaughter of Palestinians and Lebanese that has fallen under the rubric of the “war on terror.” The only ones pleased with these wars are the American neoconservatives, the Israeli right-wing, the U.S. corporate military-security complex, and Osama bin Laden...

Reelecting Republicans means the end of the United States as a land of liberty. [More]

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. . . read more

The irony is that sacrificing fundamental commitments to the rule of law ("disappearing" suspects into secret CIA prison and "waterboarding" them to compel them to talk; asserting unchecked executive power to violate criminal laws and spy on Americans without warrants; holding suspects indefinitely in Guantanamo's law-free zone; attacking Iraq against the will of the U.N. Security Council and most of the world) have not made America safer, but in fact more vulnerable to future terrorist attacks. . . read more

"The right to liberty is one of the foundation rights of a free people.  The idea  that any US President can bypass Congress and bypass the Courts by issuing an  Executive Order setting up a new legal system for indefinite detention of people  should rightfully scare the hell out of the American people. Advisors in the Obama administration have floated the idea of creating a special  new legal system to indefinitely detain people by Executive Order."

With the goal being to clean up the Guantanamo Bay disaster, Quigley and Warren argue that this is by no means a solution and it may even be worse. Click the link to read more at Counter Punch.  . . read more