re: #191 karmic_inquisitor
Hey karmic_inquisitor - from your link:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday endorsed the establishment of a formal truth commission to investigate Bush administration anti-terrorism policies, including an examination of former top Justice Department lawyers who crafted the legal justifications for what critics say was torture.
Such a probe could target UC Berkeley law Professor John Yoo, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Bush Justice Department who was instrumental in crafting the interrogation memoranda, and his former boss, Jay Bybee, now a judge on the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

Pelosi’s endorsement follows President Obama’s signal Tuesday that he was open to the idea. Obama’s shift, in tandem with last week’s release by the administration of past memos describing brutal interrogation techniques on terror suspects, has touched a match to the seething controversy over whether there should be a public or legal accounting for Bush administration policies on torture and detention.

The Obama administration had initially downplayed any suggestion of prosecutions, provoking an outcry from the left. Now the outcry is coming from the right, with even moderate Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania warning that such investigations, without evidence of criminal acts, smack of a banana republic.
In a sit-down with reporters in her Capitol Hill conference room, Pelosi, a San Francisco Democrat, said the advantage of such a commission would be that “it removes all doubt that how we protect the American people is in a values-based way.” She also said she knew several years ago that Rep. Jane Harman, D-Venice (Los Angeles County), was overheard on a wiretap, a controversy that erupted early this week.

Liberal Democrats have been pressing the issue for months with little traction, given the Obama administration’s reluctance and fierce Republican resistance, but now are re-energized. Republicans moved to dash what they called a retrospective tribunal that would unfairly target officials who followed legal guidance at the time and intimidate officials going forward.

A furor has also erupted over Obama National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair’s statements last week that “high-value information” came from the interrogations, indicating divisions within the administration.

[emphasis realwest]
Even if they do investigate what did PELOSI know and WHEN did she know it, this is nothing more than an attempt to mug Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et.al., it is also, I believe, an attempt to totally discredit our intelligence agencies and our military. And that move is indeed a calculated one, although other than political payback, I can fathom no reason to do that.