A brief followup to my earlier post. The Tory-Lib Dem coalition in Britain isn't as interested in "looking forward" on torture as the Obama administration:

A judge-led inquiry is to be held into claims British security services were complicit in the torture of terror suspects, the BBC understands.

[...]

The inquiry will offer compensation to those people who are found to have been the victims of torture carried out by foreign security services but with the knowledge of intelligence officials.

U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald on the conviction of Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge, who tortured criminal suspects in his custody and covered it up for decades:

At long last, a measure of justice was delivered today when a jury returned a verdict of guilty against Jon Burge on obstruction of justice and perjury. The verdict necessarily found that torture and abuse occurred in police districts in the city of Chicago in the 1980s. It’s disgraceful that torture happened and sad that it took so long to bring Burge to justice, and the only thing that would have been worse is if this measure of justice never happened.

Jill Scott is a better singer than Erykah Badu, no matter what G.D. says. More on this tomorrow.

Julianne Hing's dispatches from the trial of Johannes Mehserle, the BART police officer who was caught on video shooting an unarmed Oscar Grant in San Francisco last year, are really quite striking:

I'm not a particularly forgiving person, and "former member of the KKK" is right up there with "former member of al-Qaeda" in terms of people I'd want to associate myself with. Still, it's hard not to look at Sen. Robert Byrd's journey from KKK leader to supporting the first black president of the United States as a uniquely American story, and one that encapsulates the essential moral journey of this country over the course of the past 100 years. We've gone from the kind of country that elects Klansmen to the Senate, to the kind of country that elects black men to the presidency.

I'm in agreement with Marcy Wheeler that Jake Tapper, in an otherwise excellent and thorough interview with CIA Chief Leon Panetta, failed to get to the one of the key questions regarding the use of drones in the targeted killings of suspected enemy targets.