That’s More than We Know

This has got to be a rotten time to be an honorable soldier, spy, or bureaucrat. With the fix permanently in place, the guilty have every prospect of getting away with civil and military crimes so long as they are of sufficiently high rank. The innocent, however, can no longer be exonerated because the courts and commissions that might serve that purpose have no credibility. Once the government has solemnly announced that obvious malefactors such as Sanchez, Gonzalez, and Rumsfeld have no culpability for the mistreatment of prisoners, the presumption becomes that everyone is complicit, though the fairer conclusion is simply that we can no longer draw any conclusions about the behavior of individuals.