George,

The Nuremberg Trials that began following WWll (1946), were important for several reasons.

Sure, it was important to bring the evildoers before a court, though its legality was somewhat in question at the time....the Nazis had committed crimes so horrific that there were simply no international laws that could have comprehended the level of evil done and sanctioned by a government in the name of the German people.

There did not exist an international law known as "crimes against humanity."

Legal scholars did and do debate the issue of "making a law to fit the crime".Ex post facto or attainder laws have always been seen having weak justification.

How could the world justify, on strict legal grounds, allowing the likes of Himmler, Goering, Goebbels and their fellow murderers not be called before the human race for an accounting of their horrors?

The answer? It couldn't.

Forget punishment, if you will, the Holocaust simply could not be regarded as "collateral damage" resulting from a war, no matter the reasons for its origins.

The Holocaust had to be seared into the conscience of Humanity, so that never again could the Family of Man stand idly by and allow genocide, torture or unspeakable horrors be visited on fellow brothers and sisters.

Admittedly, I don't know how the Allies were able to bring the evildoers of Nazism to trials at Nuremberg, maybe simply, because they could.But, for whatever reason, the world got to witness a period marked by crimes that even the craziest among us could not imagine.

For that reason, alone, Nuremberg was important.

So it is with eight years of Bushism--who could ever imagine the word "torture" in the same sentence with the "United States of America"?

Torture of human captives, many never charged with a crime, many later to be innocent of any charges.Unknown numbers "renditioned" to other countries to be even more severely tortured.Waterboarding, a method of torture outlawed since the Inquisition, sanctioned by the Bush Gang.

Many of these victims were turned over by kidnappers rewarded for the "bodies".Many were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.Regardless, they were A-Rabs and judged as Islamic terrorists!, thereby subject to harsh treatment.

Reading of the methods made "legal" by the questionable legal judgement of characters like John Yoo and David Addington is the stuff of Kafka--the accounts of torture by humiliation, sleep deprivation, cold water splashings, dogs, degrading sexual acts is gut wrenching at best.

This was the darkest period in the young history of our Democracy, and it was authorized at the highest levels of our government.

Like the Holocaust, this CANNOT be seen as something "in the past"--we can't "move on" and allow this stain to go into history books!

We shall never recover our greatness as a nation if we just regard this as "too divisive".

These are not legal issues I am addressing here, these ARE crimes against humanity!

President Obama is wrong, plain wrong, to think otherwise.I am ashamed as a human being and as a member of a society that talks of fairness and "liberty and justice for all"

Not so much for punishment, but for enlightenment. Not so much for vengeance but to tell the world the past eight years is an aberration and we pledge this evil will not pass this way again!

It must be done

Harry Tenney (Electronic mail, January 31, 2009)