Awhile back, Digby wrote she feels the torture debate slipping away. I'd like to try and put this in context. This was always going to be tough. It is a fight worth fighting, but nowhere in the world has the still potent previous ruling order ever rolled over and taken their lumps for the crimes they committed while in power without a massive fight. While we may make references to Nuremburg, the most important difference there was that the Nuremburg trials were an act of imposing international law on Germany and Japan after conquering them. This is an attempt to have domestic law enforcement mechanisms go after the leaders of the previous government for their official policy. In the US, I don't believe such a thing has been done. Worldwide, it isn't so common either.
Watergate is not an apt comparison either. Nixon's motivies were clearly about personal advancement. He wasn't ordering buildings firebombed and journalists murdered to "protect" America, he was cheating in the competitive game of politics. Further, he acted guilty and had been stupid enough to tape himself. The war crimes of the Bush Administration exist in a different realm, because they mostly lack a personal benefit motive on the part of the players involved. They are still all over television brazenly defending what they did and attacking Obama for not continuing all of it. It is still possible for them to claim all this was done to defend the nation, for the greater good and so on. Nixon's claims of this sort were not credible. For whatever reason, time and again personal failings bring down the scandal avalanche in a way that other illegality does not. No doubt part of this is the pernicious US domestic news media, but not all of it. People just seem to viscerally loathe bright line personal corruption in a way that makes, say, $90,000 in a freezer a much bigger deal than 90,000 (or 900,000) dead innocent Iraqi civilians. It's a serious challenge for the long term viability of democracy.
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