A Glimmer of Hope in America

There's a momentum building in some American media this morning to finally get to the bottom of who ordered the waterboarding of al Qaeda suspects and why. Best of all, those calling for an inquiry aren't looking at hapless Justice Department stooges any longer. Not any more. Now all eyes have shifted to Dick Cheney and his minions.

McClatchey Newspapers, the former Knight Ridder news service and the only American news organization to steadfastly dispute their president's lies in the runup to the invasion of Iraq, has broken the story of documents indicating that Cheney used torture in the fullest medieval sense to extract false confessions, not intelligence, and that he directed Justice Department lawyers to furnish legal opinions to suit his vile purposes. This is, of course, the same creep who pressured America's intelligence agencies to cherrypick information in order to create a warped justification for invading Iraq.

As soon as word leaked out of one al-Qaeda captive who'd been waterboarded 180 times and another who got the treatment 83 times it was obvious that his torturers and their bosses weren't after 'reliable intelligence.' They were torturing these people for the same reason the Khmer Rouge tortured their own people, for the same reason that medieval monarchs had unfortunates tortured - to extract false confessions.

Barack Obama had to have known and feared what would happen with the release of these documents. He had to have known they would shine a veritable spotlight on key players within the Bush regime. He must have feared the prospect that an investigation and prosecution, once begun, could spiral out of anyone's control and even disrupt his efforts to undo much of the damage bequeathed America by the Bush charlatans. He had to have feared the guilt, the angry recrimination and the social division this dark truth would inflict on his countrymen. What a frightening prospect for someone trying to stop a runaway locomotive.

But the deed, it appears, is done. The genie is out of the bottle. This leaves FOX and the gaggle of miscreants such as Hannity, Beck and Limbaugh no option but to make themselves look even more disingenuous, more loathsome, by denying what happened or, worse, finally trying futilely to justify it. This could be the wheel on which they too are finally broken.

There is now a glimmer of hope.