okay, I've got a technical request--earlier this morning you had the big banner headline story about Conrad using another CBO request to delay the finance committee bill--now it's disappeared and you've got this one. If you're going to replace one banner story for another, can you at least place the previous one beneath or next to the new one somewhere on your main page?.
As it is now, you make it very hard to find stories you had just posted within hours, and it's not very user-friendly.
Thanks--

Obama made his biggest mistake when he trusted anything said to him by Bush-Cheney's military and Bush-Cheney's intelligence services. They will gladly sacrifice Obama to their most important mission; avoiding any kind of accounting, moral, legal, financial or military, for the last eight years.

Oh, and Barack, baby, you don't prohibit torture, the law does. How far do you want to continue down l'etat, she's-a moi avenue? I bet you take it all the way to the blame for Bush's wars.

I'm encouraged that Obama talked about torture to the UN general assembly. Bear in mind that most heads of state, allies, stated enemies, neutral parties are there. Bear in mind that all have now a healthy skepticism of what our country says, hence Obama's mention of "leading by example." Bear also in mind that every word that a head of state says is parsed to death by other countries (and us too). Him stating this outright isn't exactly an apology, but it is an admission and a wish that we will do better.

On this issue, I don't know how we can erase the past misdeeds. Actually, we can't erase anything. The only recourse is to vehemently declare that this is not our policy from this day forward. I think that there needs to be some new law spelling out in forceful terms what future infractions that violators of a treaty that we have signed (like, say, the Geneva Convention perhaps?) will warrant in the future.

So, yes, this is encouraging. I do think, however, that a vehement declaration could also be matched by some backbone at home and some decisive action to those who've destroyed what we stand for. We can ensure that it won't happen again in the future, but how do we atone for what the assholes who perpetrated torture in our country did in the past?

I'll be encouraged when I see Obama close Bagram. So far, he's just moved the practice to a less exposed location. On this stuff, words don't count.