Saturday, February 20, 2010

Yoo Who -- The Drink of Forgiving and Forgetting

Reported today, in the New York Times:

After five years of often bitter internal debate, the Justice Department concluded in a report released Friday that the lawyers who gave legal justification to the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation tactics for terrorism suspects used flawed legal reasoning but were not guilty of professional misconduct.

John Yoo, who in a decent country would have been considered a war criminal, escaped even the lesser charges of professional misconduct for harnessing his talents to the waterboarding and "enhanced interrogations" that shocked the consciences of good people around the world, if not here at home in the land of the free and the home of the indifferent. Where war crimes are simply shoved under the rug in the interests of some faux bipartisan amity, of binding up the untreated wounds of the nation, and where such behavior can be expected to occur again. The moral hazard of our exceptionalism.

Shame. Shame.