@Original Andrew: To state something obvious: The media, not satisfied with failing us in 2002-2003, are intent on failing us again. You don’t have to do the Full Olbermann to see something wrong in all this.

Pretty much where you’d expect: signing seven figure book deals; ensconsced in the academic institutions they claim to despise and teaching a whole new generation that crime pays; appearing as Serious Experts and regular contributors on teevee and in our Pravda-esque noospapers, and so forth.

But I may fill in this one some more. I forgot to include the odd coincidence of Powell giving his UN speech the afternoon a Senate committee was discussing Bybee’s appeals-court nomination, for example. And I thought about including the torture law Reagan signed, but I liked the forty-year jump from the Geneva Conventions to the War Crimes Act.

(And yes, there’s definitely an interesting follow-up comparing Inhofe’s comments between 1996 and now. For one thing, he mentions the Oklahoma City bombing in that same speech.)

But the main thing was that I personally needed to make sense of all the facts that dribbled out last week, your classic newspaper timeline sidebar. And I needed a resource to judge all the lies coming out this week.

Case in point: There’s a quote out there from a NYT reporter saying he can’t call it “torture” because that’s in dispute. Well, no it isn’t. One of the patterns we see is Rummy & Minions deliberating ignoring the legal consensus, cherry-picking the Gitmo lawyer’s provisional opinion and shutting down the review by the Pentagon’s own legal office. Torturing was railroaded, just as — and at the same time — the war was railroaded.

Literally: a criminal conspiracy.

Another thread I don’t follow here, but is definitely worth following up, is the role of the psychiatrists — licensed medical professionals. The 2007 Vanity Fair story looks at SERE shrink Bruce Jessen, and it’s worth a fresh visit in light of what we know now.

Still another thread: Where are they now? Not all the names are familiar — like Yoo, Delahunty is back in academia.

So I may build on this, but probably not extend the timeline. The Senate report does carry it through to Bagram and Abu Ghraib, and there’s yet another story about the fate of the “bad apples” that Olbermann’s been touching on, but my interest is how it all started.

Jamie supposes something was done in Mexico to offend the gods. On a related note, up in Virginia Beach, Pat Robertson was just heard shouting, “NO, YOU IDIOT! IOWA! SMITE IOWA!”