The reason we must keep the torture issue alive is not to exact a small measure of comeuppance from the Bush administration zealots who bent the law till it screamed, but to alter the course of history.

Thus the filing of disciplinary complaints a few days ago against 12 Bush administration lawyers, who crafted the quasi-legal justifications that made waterboarding a household word, has significance well beyond the case for their disbarment. This action, taken by a coalition of citizen organizations — from the ACLU and Vets for Peace to the Libertarian Party of West Virginia, 200 groups in total, claiming a membership of more than a million people — represents, as I see it, American citizens’ furthest reach of patriotic sanity.

The Bush sins are unoriginal. We’ve always done torture. We’ve always been at war with a dehumanized (and usually dark-skinned) other, whom we have simultaneously attempted to kill and, in our armed righteousness, “save.”

To understand what’s up with President Obama as he escalates the war in Afghanistan, there may be no better place to look than a book published 25 years ago. “The March of Folly,” by historian Barbara Tuchman, is a chilling assessment of how very smart people in power can do very stupid things -- how a war effort, ordered from on high, goes from tic to repetition compulsion to obsession -- and how we, with undue deference and lethal restraint, pay our respects to the dominant moral torpor to such an extent that mass slaughter becomes normalized in our names.

What happens among policymakers is a “process of self-hypnosis,” Tuchman writes. After recounting examples from the Trojan War to the British moves against rebellious American colonists, she devotes the closing chapters of “The March of Folly” to the long arc of the U.S. war in Vietnam. The parallels with the current escalation of the war in Afghanistan are more than uncanny; they speak of deeply rooted patterns.

After 13 years of detention, Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has been jailed again on trumped up charges by the brutal Burmese regime. Call on UN Secretary General to secure her and all political prisoners' release. Burma's democracy leader and Nobel Peace prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi, has been locked up on new trumped up charges, just days before her 13 years of detention was due to expire. She and thousands of fellow monks and students have been imprisoned for bravely challenging the brutal military regime with peaceful calls for democracy. Risking danger to speak out for their jailed friends, Burmese activists are demanding the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and all political prisoners and calling on the world to help. We have just six days to get a flood of petition signatures to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon calling on him to make their release a top priority -- he can make this a condition of any renewed international engagement. Follow the link to sign the petition, and forward this email on to friends to ensure Aung San Suu Kyi and all political prisoners are freed. Burmese activists will present the global petition to the media on May 26th: