This is an unbelievable moment. Dick Cheney's PR offensive over the last month actually worked. Barack Obama just crumbled and will follow Cheney's command to not release the new set of detainee abuse pictures.

By the way, if you hadn't figured it out by now, that's why you saw every Cheney in the world on television arguing that torture works and that releasing more information would gravely harm the troops. They weren't worried about what was already released; they were worried about what was going to get released. They were trying to pre-empt the most damaging thing of all - the pictures that show the torture.

Just talk about torture doesn't really do it for the American people. But when they see pictures, they get it. That's why Bush had to apologize profusely and throw a few low-level soldiers under the bus when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out. You think there would have been anywhere near that level of controversy or accountability (such that it was) without the pictures?

How many Americans have heard of Bagram Air Base and how we tortured people to death there? A scant few. How many would have heard of it if there were pictures of detainees shackled from the ceiling in a Palestinian hanging or bleeding to death? Pictures are worth a billion words.

You know why? Television! If something isn't on television, it didn't happen. And television producers are obsessed with visuals (makes some sense since it's a visual medium, but their obsession winds up dumbing down the news if there aren't any pictures or video to go along with an important story).

Is there anyone in the country more reliably moderate than retired Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor? She is a lifelong Republican who was the critical vote that put George Bush into office in 2000. For which liberals will probably never forgive her.

She's also the person who said about Republican attacks against an independent judiciary, "It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings." She was also the deciding vote against overturning Roe v. Wade. For which conservatives will never forgive her.

Both sides might have a bone to pick with her, but there is no question that she has maintained a stubborn impartiality throughout her long career. This is why I think she might be just the right person to head an impartial investigation of the possible torture committed under the Bush administration.

I personally don't favor a truth commission, simply because we already know most of what happened, the real question is what are we going to do about it? But if there is a nonpartisan Truth Commission, O'Connor should probably lead it.

I would go even further and ask her to be the special independent prosecutor in a criminal investigation of torture by the Justice Department. Now that we largely know what was authorized under Bush and how it worked its way down the chain of command and what the results were (and why it was done), what we really need is someone to determine if specific laws were broken.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times. We practiced sleep deprivation on him for 11 straight days. I don't know how many times we smashed his head against a wall, slapped him in the face, put him in a stress position in a freezing room and/or put him in a coffin sized box in extreme heat. But the right-wing argues that it doesn't matter because none of this is torture. They are adamant in saying that it is not even open to interpretation.

Because, remember, if it's at least open to interpretation, we should investigate to see if laws were broken and we crossed the line into torture. Their logic is that this is so obviously not torture that it does not require any investigation at all! It's an open and shut case.

Obviously, I disagree. It's one thing to admit that this appears to have crossed the line but you have no problem with that because we should be torturing the bad guys to get information out of them (that is a less morally defensible position but at least it's logically consistent). But it's another thing to claim that all of these "enhanced interrogation" techniques are nowhere near torture.

So, let me ask you this -- what if Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had died during one of these extreme interrogations?

Here is a perfectly plausible hypothetical: He's had no sleep for eight days, he's exhausted and stuffed in a tiny box in a sweltering hot room with insects crawling all over him, we take him out, smash his head against the wall three times and then waterboard him for the 162nd time. And boom he goes into cardiac arrest and dies on the spot. Did we just torture him to death or was his death just coincidental? Was his interrogation so obviously clean that it doesn't even require an investigation?

The Gambian government rounded up about a thousand people in a massive witch hunt last week. Literally. They really believed these people were witches and presented an existential threat to the Gambia.

They made many of the accused drink potions to get them to confess to being witches. They then dunked a lot of them in that same "dirty water." Finally, they tortured them to within an inch of their life. And lo and behold, they confessed. It turns out there are witches in Gambia!

At least, Dick Cheney must think so, because torture works, right? Or is it possible that people will say absolutely anything to get you to stop torturing them, including admitting to being a witch?

The President of Gambia was rumored to have said, "Fighting witches is a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business. These are evil people. And we're not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek."

So, I would like to ask all conservatives, neoconservatives and Republicans who defended the Bush-Cheney regime of torture: If torture works, are those people in Gambia really witches?

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There are now conflicting stories about when Tim Geithner knew about the AIG bonuses. The administration says he found out last week. But Congress (and obviously the administration) knew of plans to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses last fall. There was an SEC filing to pay $469 million in "retention payments" to AIG executives in November of last year.

How could Geithner not have known about any of this? He'd have to be the only one in Washington that didn't know. More troubling is his earlier instance, especially during the stimulus package fight, that these companies be able to pay bonuses without much limitation.

Look at this article from February 9th in the New York Times that explains how he fought against pay caps -- and won. How is this not completely his responsibility?

For him to pretend to be surprised now when he actively fought to make sure bonuses were not limited is disingenuous at best.

Finally, another interesting question is -- why? He claims it's because these banks couldn't keep the best and the brightest talent otherwise. That seems laughable, but he might have actually believed it because he has been surrounded by people who have internalized this idea for so long.

But let's consider one other possibility first.