Probably, because we continue to shrug and turn away even when confronted with the truth.
Another nail has just been driven into the coffin of the former vice president's legitimacy. The latest in a series of accounts about prisoners at Guantanamo reveals yet more serious lies. Although, as Andrew Sullivan points out, our media have not covered the story, "a first-hand eye-witness to the Bush-Cheney administration's contempt for due process and embrace of torture, stated under oath what he saw on the inside."
Sullivan goes on to remind us that the Bush administration had, of course, rounded up innocents, tossed them into Gitmo, and labeled them "the worst of the worst." Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's chief of staff, signed a declaration a couple of weeks ago.
I came to understand that there were several different reasons for the refusal to release detainees in Guantánamo, even those who were likely innocent. These reasons continued to the time of my departure from the Department of State in 2005. At least part of the problem was that it was politically impossible to release them. The concern expressed was that if they were released to another country, even an ally such as the United Kingdom, the leadership of the Defense Department would be left without any plausible explanation to the American people, whether the released detainee was subsequently found to be innocent by the receiving country, or whether the detainee was truly a terrorist and, upon release were it to then occur, would return to the war against the U.S.
Another concern was that the detention efforts at Guantánamo would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were.
Wilkerson also noted that "Secretary Powell was also trying to bring pressure to bear regarding a number of specific detentions because children as young as 12 and 13 and elderly as old as 92 or 93 had been shipped to Guantánamo..."
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Cheney is a free man. And so is Henry Kissinger. Now documents are emerging showing Kissinger's complicity in more than one murder. Seriously. HK the hitman. But we knew that.