The blacklisted mathematics instructor Chandler Davis, after serving six months in the Danbury federal penitentiary for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), warned the universities that ousted him and thousands of other professors that the purges would decimate the country's intellectual life.

"You must welcome dissent; you must welcome serious, systematic, proselytizing dissent—not only the playful, the fitful, or the eclectic; you must value it enough, not merely to refrain from expelling it yourselves, but to refuse to have it torn from you by outsiders," he wrote in his 1959 essay "...From an Exile." "You must welcome dissent not in a whisper when alone, but publicly so potential dissenters can hear you. What potential dissenters see now is that you accept an academic world from which we are excluded for our thoughts. This is a manifest signpost over all your arches, telling them: Think at your peril. You must not let it stand. You must (defying outside power; gritting your teeth as we grit ours) take us back."

But they did not take Davis back. Davis, whom I met a few days ago in Toronto, could not find a job after his prison sentence and left for Canada. He has spent his career teaching mathematics at the University of Toronto. He was one of the lucky ones. Most of the professors ousted from universities never taught again. Radical and left-wing ideas were effectively stamped out. The purges, most carried out internally and away from public view, announced to everyone inside the universities that dissent was not protected. The confrontation of ideas was killed.

"Political discourse has been impoverished since then," Davis said. "In the 1930s it was understood by anyone who thought about it that sales taxes were regressive. They collected more proportionately from the poor than from the rich. Regressive taxation was bad for the economy. If only the rich had money, that decreased economic activity. The poor had to spend what they had and the rich could sit on it. Justice demands that we take more from the rich so as to reduce inequality. This philosophy was not refuted in the 1950s and it was not the target of the purge of the 1950s. But this idea, along with most ideas concerning economic justice and people's control over the economy, was cleansed from the debate. Certain ideas have since become unthinkable, which is in the interest of corporations such as Goldman Sachs. The power to exclude certain ideas serves the power of corporations. It is unfortunate that there is no political party in the United States to run against Goldman Sachs. I am in favor of elections, but there is no way I can vote against Goldman Sachs."

The silencing of radicals such as Davis, who had been a member of the Communist Party, although he had left it by the time he was investigated by HUAC, has left academics and intellectuals without the language, vocabulary of class war and analysis to critique the ideology of globalism, the savagery of unfettered capitalism and the ascendancy of the corporate state. And while the turmoil of the 1960s saw discontent sweep through student bodies with some occasional support from faculty, the focus was largely limited to issues of identity politics—feminism, anti-racism—and the anti-war movements. The broader calls for socialism, the detailed Marxist critique of capitalism, the open rejection of the sanctity of markets, remained muted or unheard. Davis argues that not only did socialism and communism become outlaw terms, but once these were tagged as heresies, the right wing tried to make liberal, secular and pluralist outlaw terms as well. The result is an impoverishment of ideas and analysis at a moment when we desperately need radical voices to make sense of the corporate destruction of the global economy and the ecosystem. The "centrist" liberals manage to retain a voice in mainstream society because they pay homage to the marvels of corporate capitalism even as it disembowels the nation and the planet.

"Repression does not target original thought," Davis noted. "It targets already established heretical movements, which are not experimental but codified. If it succeeds very well in punishing heresies, it may in the next stage punish originality. And in the population, fear of uttering such a taboo word as communism may in the next stage become general paralysis of social thought."

It is this paralysis he watches from Toronto. It is a paralysis he predicted. Opinions and questions regarded as possible in the 1930s are, he mourns, now forgotten and no longer part of intellectual and political debate. And perhaps even more egregiously the fight and struggle of radical communists, socialists and anarchists in the 1930s against lynching, discrimination, segregation and sexism were largely purged from the history books. It was as if the civil rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had no antecedents in the battles of the Wobblies as well as the socialist and communist movements.

"Even the protests that were organized entirely by Trotskyists were written out of history," Davis noted acidly.

Those who remained in charge of American intellectual thought went on to establish the wider "heresy of leftism" in the name of academic objectivity. And they have succeeded. Universities stand as cowardly, mute and silent accomplices of the corporate state, taking corporate money and doing corporate bidding. And those with a conscience inside the walls of the university understand that tenure and promotion require them to remain silent.

"Not only were a number of us driven out of the American academic scene, our questions were driven out," said Davis, who at 84 continues to work as emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto. "Ideas which were on the agenda a hundred years ago and sixty years ago have dropped out of memory because they are too far from the new center of discourse."

Davis has published science fiction stories, is the editor of The Mathematical Intelligencer and is an innovator in the theory of operators and matrices. He is a director of Science for Peace. He also writes poetry. His nimble mind ranges swiftly in our conversation over numerous disciplines and he speaks with the enthusiasm and passion of a new undergraduate. His commitment to radical politics remains fierce and undiminished. And he believes that the loss of his voice and the voices of thousands like him, many of whom were never members of the Communist Party but had the courage to challenge the orthodoxy of the Cold War and corporate capitalism, deadened intellectual and political discourse in the United States.

During World War II Davis joined the Navy and worked on the minesweeping research program. But by the end of the war, with the saturation bombings of Dresden and Tokyo, as well as the dropping of the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he came to regret his service in the military. He has spent most of his life working in a variety of anti-war and anti-nuclear movements.

"In retrospect I am sorry I didn't declare myself as a conscientious objector," he said. "Not at the beginning of the war, because if you are ever going to use military force for anything, that was a situation in which I would be happy to do it. I was wholehearted about that. But once I knew about the destruction of Dresden and the other massacres of civilian populations by the Allies, I think the ethical thing to do would have been to declare myself a CO."

He was a "Red diaper baby." His father was a professor, union agitator and member of the old Communist Party who was hauled in front of HUAC shortly before his son. Davis grew up reading New Masses and moved from one city to the next because of his father's frequent firings.

"I was raised in the movement,' he said. "It wasn't a cinch I would be in the Communist Party, but in fact I was, starting in 1943 and then resigning soon after on instructions from the party because I was in the military service. This was part of the coexistence of the Communist Party with Roosevelt and the military. It would not disrupt things during the war. When I got out of the Navy I rejoined the Communist Party, but that lapsed in June of 1953. I never got back in touch with them. At the time I was subpoenaed I was technically an ex-Communist, but I did not feel I had left the movement and in some sense I never did."

Davis got his doctorate from Harvard in mathematics and seemed in the 1950s destined for a life as a professor. But the witch hunts directed against “Reds” swiftly ended his career on the University of Michigan faculty. He mounted a challenge to the Committee on Un-American Activities that went to the Supreme Court. The court, ruling in 1960, three years after Joseph McCarthy was dead, denied Davis’ assertion that the committee had violated the First Amendment protection of freedom of speech. He was sent to prison. Davis, while incarcerated, authored a research paper that had an acknowledgement reading: “Research supported in part by the Federal Prison System. Opinions expressed in this paper are the author’s and are not necessarily those of the Bureau of Prisons.” Davis, who has lived in Canada longer than he lived in the United States, said that his experience of marginalization was "good for the soul and better for the intellect."

"Though you see the remnants of the former academic left still, though some of us were never fired, though I return to the United States from my exile frequently, we are gone," he said. "We did not survive as we were. Some of us saved our skins without betraying others or ourselves. But almost all of the targets either did crumble or were fired and blacklisted. David Bohm and Moses Finley and Jules Dassin and many less celebrated people were forced into exile. Most of the rest had to leave the academic world. A few suffered suicide or other premature death. There weren't the sort of wholesale casualties you saw in Argentina or El Salvador, but the Red-hunt did succeed in axing a lot of those it went after, and cowing most of the rest. We were out, and we were kept out."

This is not an article about the politics of religion.

Mostly, anyhow.

This is an article about the religion of politics. And the harm it does to our country. And – since we’re a big fat superpower – the harm it does to the world.

By 'religion of politics', I don't really mean religion at all. Religion is, without question, the greatest disaster to plague humanity, and that’s just on one of its good days. But that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about, instead, the manner in which too many of us do our politics. I'm talking about how too many of us (which is to say any number above zero) approach politics like we approach religion.

Fundamentally, it seems to me there are two basic ways in which we can seek to comprehend our world: the empirical or the assumptive. The scientific or the faith-based. The (roughly speaking) cognitive or the emotional.

I know its fashionable in our time to try to reconcile the two, to say that science has its domain and religion has its. But that's rubbish. The truth is that they are competing modalities for engaging life and the environment in which it dwells. On any given matter, one can make a judgement based on evidence and logic, or you can take a position based on what you prefer to believe. Those two approaches apply to every question ranging from the existence of god to whether the US should invade Iraq (and those who answered the latter affirmatively should count themselves lucky that the former answer is negative).

Of course, there are rarely if ever fully 'correct' answers to any of these questions in any abstract sense. But there is an investigatory process that will get you as close to the 'correct answer' – or a best functioning approximation – as is humanly possible, and then there is an alternative approach, called 'let's all pretend.' The first path may not get you where you want to be, but the second one is almost sure not to. The first approach may not solve your problems, but the second is almost guaranteed to exacerbate them.

This is not exactly a new observation, of course. The Founders of the American state were profoundly men of the first category, as leading figures in the Enlightenment, a movement which practically defined itself over the principle of rejecting superstition and assumption in favor of rational analysis. For all the faults that would later be attributed (some rightly, most wrongly) to rationality, science and Enlightenment thinking, this cognitive sea change marks one of the greatest moments of the entire human story. I see it as the adolescence of humankind.

The Enlightenment approach is also, among other things, at the very foundation of the idea of democracy. First because it gives humans license to control their own destiny. And second because there is, after all, no point to the concept of self-rule by the people if the body politic is ill-equipped to make thoughtful decisions.

America faces so many huge problems in our time. But I see none as consequential as the fact that our body politic is indeed ill-equipped to make thoughtful decisions. We are fast losing the capacity for anything even approximating dispassionate empirical observation and rational analysis. Ultimately, this will mark the greatest of the many triumphs of the dark forces of regressivism - to regress us as a society to a pre-Enlightenment modality in our relationship with our world. To push us back three hundred or more years, to a time when 'knowledge' was given, fixed and dogmatically defended. Or worse - when even questioning such ideas would itself be considered heretical if not absurd.

This is the greatest victory that the right can win - to discredit, disdain and destroy heterodoxy, to elevate unquestioned and unquestionable authority to the supreme power of popularly-enforced social convention' and to ultimately destroy the societal value and even the capacity for critical thinking. If you want to plunder, unfettered by resistance or even the legitimacy of challenge, you must not only remove the questions from the table, you must take away the table as well. You want to turn the art of independent, rational analysis into the political equivalent of something esoteric, like ancient Tibetan calligraphy. Practiced by lepers.

This is the America we live in today, or at least the one we're fast headed toward.

On election night earlier this month, I sat in doing analysis of the returns on a Long Island radio station. With me was a very personable, well-informed (by conventional standards) guy who holds a significant position in local government, and who told me that he had been asked to run for Congress this year, but declined because he has a small child at home. At one point in the broadcast, I mentioned that it was absurd to call Barack Obama a liberal, let alone a socialist. At the next break, he good-naturedly teased me for saying that, as if I hadn't really believed it, but was just trying to do a little liberal propaganda work. I looked at him and said, "I'm dead serious. I can name ten examples of right-wing policy from this White House. Can you name three examples of liberalism?" His face fell a bit. I said, "Okay, how about one?" Then he sort of uncomfortably laughed and said, "You know you’re never going to get me to believe that!"

As a matter of fact, he had no idea how much I knew I was never going to convince him to believe that. I knew I wasn't because I’ve come to see over the last decade how the regressive mind (I’m being generous in my nomenclature here) works (again). It is not only increasingly incapable of rational thought, it is increasingly defined by that incapacity. It is characterized by the pre-Enlightenment tribal mentality in which our team is always good and right, and 'facts' are either accepted dogmatically, rejected out of hand, or just plain fabricated out of whole cloth to service that desperately held weltanschauung.

It is a frightening world, precisely because it is so frightened a world. The people who inhabit it are so uncomfortable with the real world that they have created a bogus one to which they tenaciously cling. The vociferousness with which they demand Fake World's hegemony over others is anything but an indicator of their confidence in the power of its principles. Quite to the contrary, that obstreperousness represents instead an inadvertent indication of the falsity of their beliefs, of the brittle precariousness of a world view that possesses all the solidity of cotton candy, and of the urgent requirement for total vigilance in order to keep the dogs of cognitive dissonance well at bay. To paraphrase Jefferson (who knew a thing or two about cognitive dissonance): It is error alone which needs the support of ideology. Truth can stand by itself.

Truth is a big problem for the right. A really big problem. And, regrettably, it is increasingly becoming a really big problem for America.

This is a country that just elected a government which – for the third major iteration in a single generation – is once again promising radical tax cuts for the wealthy and a balanced budget at the same time. How willfully stupid do you have to be to believe that that little exercise will turn out differently this time than it did when Reagan instead tripled the national debt, or Lil' Bush doubled it?

And how intentionally ignorant do you have to be to continue to take right-wing economic policy at face value anymore, anyhow? Thirty years ago, Reagan's OMB director, David Stockman, told us to our faces that the whole trickle down line was pure bullshit, used for the purpose of justifying tax cuts for the wealthy to moronic voters. And yet we pretended like we never actually saw what was behind the curtain Toto pulled aside. And still we pretend, even as we've now lived through – and lived with the consequences of - the greatest transfer of wealth in all of human history, a massive looting of the middle class, working class and poor alike, all to benefit the already fantastically wealthy. So just what kind of fervently-held political religion must you desperately be clinging to in order to still take the economic policy pronouncements of a John Boehner or a Dick Armey seriously in the year 2010?

Or how about foreign policy? Paul Wolfowitz - a reptilian combination of academic aloofness and lethal arrogance not seen on the American stage since Henry Kissinger cashed it all in for the money - played the role of George Bush's David Stockman. The son of a bitch came right out and told us to our faces that the whole WMD riff was nothing less than a Madison Avenue marketing campaign of epic proportions. Then the Downing Street Memos confirmed that truth with leaked evidence from the highest levels of the British and American governments. And yet we nod and yawn today as a proven war criminal now tours the country hawking ridiculously deceitful lies in the form of a presidential memoir, to cover ridiculously destructive prior lies in the form of a government, and one which, for that matter, only came into being on the basis of ridiculously ominous earlier lies in the form of the conservative cabal on the US Supreme Court. But, hey, it's only millions of lives at stake. Why bother noticing?

These are only the most glaring and prominent examples. The list is endless. We continue to flatter ourselves with the idiotic mantra that we are the greatest thing to happen to the planet since Rome, even while just about every statistic measuring the health and well-being of societies show us rapidly becoming a banana republic. But you can't say that in America today. It's heresy. We have a religion to protect.

It's bad enough for a society to make the wrong decisions, particularly since the effects can be devastating. But what makes our present situation especially hopeless is that we continue to insist on making decisions the wrong way. That approach to policy making, and indeed to reckoning the very world we inhabit, will almost always guarantee disaster. Go ahead and believe if you want that Jesus will save you from losing your suburban, white-collar, big-screen HDTV existence, but that don't make it so, pal. The guy couldn't even save himself, and then he hasn't bothered to show his face on the planet for more than 2,000 years now. Not even for the Thirty Years' War, when Catholics and Protestants annihilated each other, to the tune of about eight or ten million dead Christian souls.

Religious zealots love to note that there are no atheists in foxholes. They're probably right, but it always struck me as hilarious the degree to which that truth undermines rather than affirms such attempts to bolster their insecurities about the fantasies to which they adhere. Of course there are no atheists in foxholes. That's because mortally frightened humans will cling to any superstition, any cosmic parental savior figure, any super-hero, any deus ex machina, or any hasty bargain they can strike promising to forego this or that vice in order to save their skinny asses from molten hot chunks of lead whizzing toward their soft fleshy bodies at petrifyingly scary velocities.

You bet they're praying for some god or another to save them, just as the wounded ones all cry out for "Mama" before they die. Of course there are no atheists in foxholes. That only confirms that people will do or believe anything if you frighten them badly enough. What's more clarifying is the fact that there are no true believers on surgeon's tables. Oh, sure, they're praying still. But if they really believed in their prayers, and their deity, they wouldn't be going in for surgery at all. Surely god is skilled and powerful enough to just heal our owies without having to work through doctors, right? And wouldn't it be so much better that way, anyhow? Think of the months of painful post-op recovery you could skip. Or all the bad television watched from your hospital bed you could avoid. Or the interminable hassles of trying to get your insurance company to actually pay what it owes. Does god really only work through Anthem Blue Cross?

Unfortunately, though, when it comes to politics, there are a lot of true believers. That is because of the luxury of time intervening between cause and effect, I suppose. When the doc says you've got cancer and you need to have surgery or you're gonna die, you check into the hospital like yesterday. But when scientists say that global warming is going to wreck the planet over the next half century, you can pretend it ain't so, especially because you know it surely means that some Washington bureaucrat is gonna come take away your freakin' Hummer. I imagine we'd act quite differently if the damage that global warming is slated to inflict upon us was going to be delivered instead by an asteroid. Oh, we'd pray like mad in our little planetary foxhole, to be sure. But first we'd get every scientist we could – you know, like climatologists – and put them to work finding a solution to save our butts.

But global warming ain't fast-moving, like an asteroid. So, instead, we allow pigs like Rush Limbaugh – locked in an endless attempt to purge all the bad memories of the bullying they endured as children – to engorge themselves at the expense of a charred planet, just as we engorge ourselves by following their lead rather than an academy full of expert climatologists. When I encounter the selfish and willfully stupid idiots who subscribe to this transparently filthy set of lies used to cover up transparently evil levels of greed, I just want to shake them by the shoulders and ask whether they’d also let Limbaugh perform their open heart surgeries as well? You know, given his vast scientific expertise on things like climatology and medicine and so on...

Our problem today runs much deeper - frighteningly deeper - than our problems. Endless wars, economic depression, environmental collapse - these are actually the good news, relatively speaking. The (very) bad news is not that we have these catastrophic crises to deal with, or even that they are all coming home to roost simultaneously, but, rather, that we have regressed back to a medieval modality for grappling with the world we inhabit. We are rapidly returning to a culture of faith, instead of one of reason. Or, put differently, we are giving up on the painful but potentially productive struggles of early adulthood to return instead to the comforts of being children.

This week, Jonah Goldberg, right-wing liar (pardon the redundancy) published a piece in which he trashed the (not really Christian, not really white, not really American) president for not embracing the idea of American exceptionalism with sufficient fervor. He quoted Obama. But, of course, he left out all kinds of other parts of what Obama said – in the exact same answer to the exact same question – that directly and completely contradicted his assertion that Obama doesn't really believe in the greatness of the country he is (supposed to be) leading. Things like "I'm enormously proud of my country and its role and history in the world." Or, "The United States remains the largest economy in the world. We have unmatched military capability. And I think that we have a core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution, in our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality, that, though imperfect, are exceptional."

This stuff goes on all the time. Basically, with regressives, if their lips are moving, they are lying. The great wonder, of course is why do people like Goldberg and Limbaugh and Beck and Bush and Palin have a voice, let alone such prominence, in what is supposed to be a grown-up, sophisticated democracy? Why do we accord them legitimacy, while disdaining and jailing pedophiles or drug dealers who do far less damage? How can a country which once achieved so much now revel so joyously in the stench of its own soiled diapers?

Beats me, man. Ah, but let's give credit where it is due. Goldberg is right. There is such a thing as American exceptionalism, after all.

Think about how exceptional you have to be to take the pioneering political, economic, human rights and technological great power of the twentieth century and return it all the way back to the Dark Ages.

And think about how truly exceptional you have to be to do so in the name of the American Founders, whose entire raison d'etre was to transcend the superstitions of those times, and replace them with the empiricism and reason of the Enlightenment.

That's a beautiful sight, if only in the sheer boldness of its scope and its gall.

Yep. America the beautiful.

America the exceptional.

I could spend all day citing similar defenses from the liberal commentariat defending the Obama administration on the ground that by giving Mohammed a civilian trial, they were merely obeying the dictates of our Constitution, the rule of law, and our values. And Obama himself voiced similar defenses to justify Holder's decision, leading The Washington Post's Greg Sargent to note "what an epic cave it would be if Obama" reversed Holder's decision (and that's to say nothing of the hordes of Democrats in the political and media class during the Bush years who dramatically condemned imprisonment-without-charges as the embodiment of tyranny, creating a "legal black hole," "shredding the Constitution," etc. etc.).

But that was back when civilian trials for the 9/11 defendants was the official position of the Obama administration. Shortly thereafter, it was reported that Obama had taken away decision-making authority from the Attorney General on this issue and would re-consider Holder's decision, and now we have this, from yesterday's Washington Post:

Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, will probably remain in military detention without trial for the foreseeable future, according to Obama administration officials.

The administration has concluded that it cannot put Mohammed on trial in federal court because of the opposition of lawmakers in Congress and in New York. There is also little internal support for resurrecting a military prosecution at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The latter option would alienate liberal supporters. . . .

The White House has made it clear that President Obama will ultimately make the decision, and a federal prosecution of Mohammed and four alleged co-conspirators has not been ruled out, senior officials said. Still, they acknowledge that a trial is unlikely to happen before the next presidential election and, even then, would require a different political environment.

It's true that this Post article relies on anonymous administration officials and notes that a final decision has not yet been made, but at some point, keeping Mohammed in a cage without a trial for a long enough time constitutes lawless, indefinite imprisonment whether the President formally announces it or not. We're clearly at that point. And, of course, it's long been reported that the President has decided to hold at least 50 other detainees at Guantanamo indefinitely without a trial or even a military commission. Imprisoning people without trials or even military tribunals is clearly the policy of this President.

It's also true that there is substantial political opposition to giving civilian trials to the 9/11 Defendants -- even Andrew Cuomo, safely elected as New York's Governor, has now joined other leading Democrats by announcing his opposition to trials in New York -- but the Federal Government doesn't need the permission of local authorities to use its own courthouses, and more important, the mandates of the Constitution and the rule of law aren't supposed to be waived for political expediency. That premise was the centerpiece of the Obama campaign -- remember? As Sargent wrote:

One of Obama’s most powerfully stated principles has been his rejection of the Cheney world view -- his insistence that the choice between upholding American legal traditions and the rule of law and maintaining our national security is a false one. If Obama does decide to try Mohammed in a military tribunal, won't the implicit message to the public be that there just may be something to what the Cheneyites have been arguing all along?

But now, it appears Obama isn't even merely putting Mohammed "in a military tribunal," but far worse, simply imprisoning him indefinitely with no process at all, based on the same "war" theories that Bush and Cheney used to defend the same policy, to such great controversy and outrage. Indeed, the claimed power to put people in cages basically for life without charging them with any crimes, even though they were captured far from any real "battlefield," was the crux of the Bush/Cheney civil liberties assault.

But what I'm interested in for the moment are those who defended Holder's decision last year on the ground that civilian trials were compelled by the Constitution, the rule of law and our values. I still vividly recall what happened when Obama reversed himself on the issue of complying with court orders to release torture photos. When he originally announced that he would release those photos, virtually every Democrat and liberal defended him from the Liz-Cheney/Bill-Kristol-led right-wing attacks by insisting that such transparency was crucial for our democratic values. But when Obama reversed himself two weeks later and announced that he would conceal these photos, many Democrats reversed right along with him and suddenly began arguing what Cheney and Kristol had been saying two weeks earlier: that concealment of the photos was justified by the imperative of National Security and Protecting Our Troops (I asked many times but never got an answer: was there a single Democrat who defended Obama's ultimate concealment of those photos who, based on their pro-concealment reasoning, had joined with Kristol and Cheney in criticizing Obama's original decision to release them?).

Obviously, those who screamed bloody murder over Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies but now justify or at least acquiesce to the same policies when implemented by Obama have serious issues with partisan loyalties trumping honest advocacy. But it's when the Obama administration reverses itself -- such as with the torture photos -- that one's intellectual honesty is most conclusively tested: one's beliefs and principles can't shift with Obama's reversals if they're to be meaningful or credible. The same issue applies here: shouldn't anyone who defended Holder's original decision on the ground that it was compelled by the Constitution, the rule of law and our values now vocally denounce Obama for his profound violations of those same doctrines? If the Obama administration merited praise last November for upholding the Constitution, the rule of law and our values with civilian trials, then it must be true that they're now violating the Constitution, the rule of law and our values by denying them. Isn't that a rather serious offense?

UPDATE:

VastLeft expresses the "evolution" on the issue of civilian trials as follows (which applies exactly to the reversal on disclosure of torture photos and so many others):

I'm not suggesting that anyone named here is guilty of this yet, but am just hoping that -- now that it's clear that civilian trials are being denied -- nobody will be guilty of it.

UPDATE II: John Cole argues that this is the fault of Congressional Democrats, not Obama, because this is "yet another example of Obama trying to do the right thing, but not one Democrat had his back." No. First, there's no indication that Obama -- as opposed to Holder -- ever cared about or even was in favor of civilian trials; shortly after Holder made his announcement, numerous reports indicated that Rahm Emanuel was furious and the Obama White House quickly took away the power to decide from Holder. Second, Cole is definitely right that there was (as usual) ample amounts of Democratic cowardice to go around, but it's just not true that "not one Democrat had his back." As but one of many examples, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) "'applauded' Holder for 'the decision to bring those individuals responsible for the attack on the World Trade Center to New York'." Pat Leahy and Russ Feingold did the same. And 45% of New Yorkers favored having the trial there, compared to only 41% opposed.

Third: even conservatives acknowledged that the decision of where to try the 9/11 defendants is the DOJ's and Obama's to make -- not Congress'; from The Hill: "Despite the torrent of GOP outrage to the White House's decision to prosecute the professed masterminds of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in civilian court, at least one lawmaker admits that not much can be done to stop it from happening. Even conservative lawmaker Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), not one known for shirking from an uphill fight, told The Hill on Friday that little can be done legislatively."