My biggest questions about this, though, are these. Really, is this the best the Heritage Foundation can do? All that corporate money and they can’t even find someone who can do original work that can stand up to the scrutiny of a tenacious and gifted DFH blogger?

There. Fixt

Hmmm. Since he’s obviously not stoopid enuf to not know that’s what he’s doing there… er, why is he doing it?

Had Iran-Contra brought the money-laundering, the role of what we now call the neocons, or the Shadow Government, into daylight their reputations would have been permanently damaged.

But there are institutional reasons — how did a small group of people subvert Congress, the military, and the Dept of State? You have to examine how that occurred, so it doesn’t happen again.

Then there’s what I call, ‘the Lynndie England reason’ to get to the bottom of it all. There’s a sad young life, who with better supervision, clear instructions, and decent training could have done something productive and useful. Instead, she’s a fall-gal for Rumsfeld, Cheney, Addington, Yoo, Bush, Cambone, Feith, Wolfowitz and the rest of that cabal.

She was a young person of limited experience, and (one supposes) not a great deal of intellectual curiosity nor judgment. But she was placed in a situation with no clear rules, with a lot of ambiguity, in a place where the worst fears and aggressions played out and she fell right into it. IMHO, with better supervision and more clear guidelines, the military could have been a great experience for that young woman.

So from an institutional perspective, you have to get to the bottom of a system that allowed those serving in the military to be pressured or tempted into perversion. You cannot — simply cannot — have a functioning military with that ‘breakdown of command and control’.

The role of Congress is to make sure things operate properly.
They didn’t.

So I see layers to a TC:
Layer #1: figuring out who was criminally culpable, and for what, and then send that group off to DoJ’s attention.
Layer #2: the national security piece: how to you rebuild the reputation by putting clear, enforceable procedures in place — and making sure that noone in the future can set up a shadowDod, a la Doug Feith’s ‘Office of Special Plans’.
Layer #3: How does the system need to be fixed so that when someone like young Lynndie England enters, she has the training, supervision, and feedback to be an asset, rather than a liability?

Only one of those layers feeds to DoJ.
The other two feed back into the institutions for quality control in the form of new laws, procedures, etc, etc.

My Russian immigrant father, who fled Communist persecution, told me more than once that avoiding political persecutions and show trials was crucial to preserving our republican form of government.

I guess his Russian immigrant Dad forgot to tell him about how the evil Commies doctored election results and removed appointed appartacheks who didn’t toe the party line just like occurred with the US Attorneys. Oh, wait….maybe he did…

Maybe Spaz’s Dad, while pointing out what was cruciual to the American form of government, was really pointing out it’s Achilles heel…”Here’s how you destroy it, Little Spaz!”

My feeling is that knowing isn’t getting us anywhere. We probably DO know much of what has gone on–enough anyway. One torture victim is enough for me. The problem is that we never do anything about any of it. The rightwing conspirators take two steps forward and zero or one step back. Then they start again, always a little more ahead. Until we make them take 5 or 10 steps back–with prison terms, fines, and disgrace–they won’t stop.