> I might be wrong, there may be other mainstream
> reporters seeing the whole cloth, but I think Hersh is
> on his own here.
What mainstream are you looking at? On the contrary -- it looks to me as though every news org from the NY Times and Washington Post to Newsweek and Time (not Fox, of course) is working overtime trying to see how far up the "chain of command" the authority for the torture can be traced (actually not only torture but outright murder, as the Times pointed out on its front page -- no cover-up here! -- yesterday).
The whole bleepin' DC power structure is coming apart at the seams. The CIA and the military intelligence are about to call down heavy artillery strikes on each other. The Iraq mess is metastasizing into a new spy scandal connecting neocons like Feith with Iranian spies through Chalabi. Congressional Republicans are squaring off against each other on whether to investigate vigorously or not -- the first time there has been serious dissent within the GOP in years. And the press, having been cowed into abject surrender by the Bushies for nearly 4 years, is smelling blood in the water and preparing to turn old W into mincemeat (probably for having allowed him to humiliate them with his cutsy-pie nicknames all this time).
Of course this doesn't mean that the Revo is getting any closer, any more than it did when a similar situation arose in the second Nixon administration. But it could mean more restrictions on the freedom of action of the bad guys, as well as more opportunities for left agitprop.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax