Truth and Reconciliation

Krugman on truth and reconciliation

Krugman's response-to-readers column, "The President Who Cried Peace," doesn't show up in Google, and I can't find it on the site, since it's disappeared behind the Times Select wall. However, this paragraph caught my eye:

Seth Feldman, Toronto: ...When Bush goes, Iraq implodes and the facts about the war and the rest of his administration start flooding out, you'd better start canceling vacations and learning how to do without sleep. The era of hidden history is coming to a very abrupt end.

Paul Krugman: One of my fears is that we won't actually get to see the hidden history. I guarantee you that there will be a chorus from the wise men of Washington urging the next president to let bygones be bygones. I hope he or she doesn't listen: we need some truth and reconciliation.

Vehement agreement. In fact, as we've said several times, we need a truth and reconciliation** Commission, so that there's some sort of institutional for the investigations.

Nuremberg prosecutor: Bush Gitmo rules betray the principles of Nuremberg

Maybe our famously free press could turn their attention from Paris Hilton for one moment to see how Bush and his authoritarian apologists and enablers have defiled our country?

Reuters:

The U.S. war crimes tribunals at Guantanamo have betrayed the principles of fairness that made the Nazi war crimes trials at Nuremberg a judicial landmark, one of the U.S. Nuremberg prosecutors said on Monday.

"I think Robert Jackson, who's the architect of Nuremberg, would turn over in his grave if he knew what was going on at Guantanamo," Nuremberg prosecutor Henry King Jr. told Reuters in a telephone interview.

"It violates the Nuremberg principles, what they're doing, as well as the spirit of the Geneva Conventions of 1949."

King, 88, served under Jackson, the U.S. Supreme Court justice who was the chief prosecutor at the trials created by the Allied powers to try Nazi military and political leaders after World War Two in Nuremberg, Germany.

"The concept of a fair trial is part of our tradition, our heritage," King said from Ohio, where he lives. "That's what made Nuremberg so immortal -- fairness, a presumption of innocence, adequate defense counsel, opportunities to see the documents that they're being tried with."

King, who interrogated Nuremberg defendant Albert Speer, was incredulous that the Guantanamo rules left open the possibility of using evidence obtained through coercion.

"To torture people and then you can bring evidence you obtained into court? Hearsay evidence is allowed? Some evidence is available to the prosecution and not to the defendants? This is a type of 'justice' that Jackson didn't dream of," King said.

Well, as we've seen with Gonzales: Since when is the criminal Bush regime about Justice?