I've been looking at the crisp blue sky and remembering when the world went silent. The unspeakable images—which we have not yet shown to our son—are seared into all of us who were adults, then. How strange is it that a generation of young people has come of age who were sitting on school buses or in schoolrooms that day, who didn't watch as hundreds of people burned cruelly to death, as New York City was coated with human ash?

As much as Hope and Change defined Barack Obama's 2008 campaign, his success was a clear rebuke of the policies in the George W. Bush presidency. Bush's approval rating hung at 25 percent on the day Obama was elected, and John McCain did everything he could to distance himself from the incumbent Republican president. Bush's legacy was tarnished for a number of reasons, but none more so than his foolhardy foreign-policy agenda. When the Democratic candidate who rose to fame for his early opposition to Iraq won the presidency, it appeared the neo-con age had come to a close.

Marcy Wheeler reports that Assistant U.S. Attorney John Durham, assigned by Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate cases in which CIA interrogators may have gone beyond the "legalized" torture guidelines established by the Bush administration's office of Legal Counsel, has recommended investigations of two cases in which detainees died. The original mandate for the investigation was " whether any unauthorized interrogation techniques were used by CIA interrogators, and if so, whether such techniques could constitute violations of the torture statute or any other applicable statute." As Ryan J.

Brian Beutler reports on the newest Republican talking point:

Like so many memes that persist in politics, this one started on the Internet. The morning after President Obama announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed in Pakistan, conservatives started crowing that credit should be given to President George W. Bush -- specifically, for having the foresight and courage to torture the people who provided the initial scraps of intel that ultimately led the CIA to a giant compound just north of Islamabad. [...]

Andrew Sullivan points us to a paper demonstrating that until the American government started doing it, waterboarding was almost always referred to as "torture" in elite American newspapers, but in the time since, it is almost never referred to as "torture" -- for example, from the 1930s to 2003, The New York Times referred to it as "torture" on 44 of 54 occasions, or 81.5 percent; but between 2004 and 2008, they referred to it as "torture" in only 2 of 143 articles, or 1.4 percent. This shouldn't be all that surprising if you've been paying attention, but it does highlight something important about our media.

When the torture memos were released, one of the things I noticed was that the authors used the presence of physicians in interrogations as alibis. The presence of the doctors was meant as proof of the U.S. officials' "good faith belief" that they didn't mean to inflict "severe physical or mental suffering" on the detainees they were interrogating, even though the express purpose of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques was to inflict enough suffering on people to get them to talk.