this is definitely

worth the read. we didn't learn our lessons then, we sure as shite aren't learning them now

'We Killed Her… That Will Be With Me the Rest of My Life'
Lawrence Wilkerson's Lessons of War and Truth

by Nick Turse

Nations in flux are nations in need. A new president will soon take office, facing hard choices not only about two long-running wars and an ever-deepening economic crisis, but about a government that has long been morally adrift. Torture-as-policy, kidnappings, ghost prisons, domestic surveillance, creeping militarism, illegal war-making, and official lies have been the order of the day. Moments like this call for truth-tellers. For Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. For witnesses willing to come forward. For brave souls ready to expose hidden and forbidden realities to the light of day.

Lawrence B. Wilkerson is such a man. He came to national prominence in October 2005 when -- having left his post as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell earlier in the year -- he laid bare some of the secrets of the Bush White House as he had experienced them. He had been inside the halls of power as the invasion and occupation of Iraq took shape. In Bush's second term, on the outside, he found that he had had enough. The American people, he thought, had a right to know just how their government was really working, and so he offered them this vision of the Bush administration in action: "[S]ome of the most important decisions about U.S. national security -- including vital decisions about postwar Iraq -- were made by a secretive, little-known cabal. It was made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld."

In the years since, Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, has not been reticent, especially when it came to "the militarization of America's foreign policy" and the practice of extraordinary rendition (the kidnapping of terror suspects and their deliverance into the hands of regimes ready and willing to torture them).

Nor, earlier this year, did he shy away from testifying before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties about how, in 2004, while still at the State Department, he had compiled "a dossier of classified, sensitive, and open source information" on American interrogation and imprisonment practices at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq that yielded, he said, "overwhelming evidence that my own government had sanctioned abuse and torture."

"We have damaged our reputation in the world and thus reduced our power," he told the panel in closing. "We were once seen as the paragon of law; we are now in many corners of the globe the laughing stock of the law."........