Oh man. So right now I’m watching this speech by Colonel Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powel’s former chief of staff at the State Department (via Kevin Drum). And boy, is he shrill. And when I say “shrill,” I mean “shuuuuuuuuuh-rrrrrrill.” Seriously, it’s like Spinal Tap designed his sound system and turned his shrillness dial up to “11.” Here he is talking about detainee abuse:

And I’ll finish just by bringing it down screechingly to the ground, and tell you that the detainee abuse issue is just such a concrete example of (the decision making process within the Bush administration) I’ve just described to you, that ten years from now or so- when it’s really, really put to the acid test, ironed out, and people have looked at it from every angle- we are going to be ashamed of what we allowed to happen. I don’t know how many people saw the Frontline documentary last night. Very well-done, I thought, but it didn’t get anywhere near the specifics that need to be shown, that need to come out, that need to say to the American people, “This is not us. This is not the way we do business in the world…”

I don’t think in our history we’ve ever had a Presidential involvement, a Secretarial involvement, a Vice-Presidential involvement, an Attorney General involvement in telling our troops that, essentially, carte blanche is the way you should feel. You should not have any qualms because this is a different kind of conflict… I understand the radical change in the nature of our enemy, but that doesn’t mean we make a radical change in the nature of America. But that’s what we did. And we did it in private. And we did it in such privacy that the Secretary of State had to open the door to my office one day… and he said, “Larry. Larry, get everything. Get all the paperwork. Get the ICRC (International Community of the Red Cross) reports. Get everything. I think this is going to be a real mess…

As former soldiers, we knew that you don’t have this kind of pervasive attitude out there unless you’ve condoned it. And whether you did it explicitly or not is irrelevant. If you did it at all… you’re in trouble. Because that slippery slope is truly slippery, and it will take years to reverse the situation.

It’s hard work.