By Hail Hamilton

January 19, with Martin Luther King, Jr. day almost over and in anticipation of the inauguration the next day, I turned on MSNBC to watch “Countdown with Keith Olbermann”. It’s one of favorite news shows. Olbermann adds controversy and humor to the otherwise brain numbing nightly national news broadcasts. In a word he is entertaining.

Olbermann is also fearless. He’s taken on the Bush Administration, the War in Iraq and a variety of other touchy subjects. And he does so with his facts in order. Some may accuse of being biased and unfair, but no one can accuse him of being incorrect. The few times he has made a mistake in his reporting, he has quickly set the record straight, in person and on the air. He has integrity.

But Olbermann is not the subject of what I have to say. It is what he said in his “Special Comment” segment of his show that Monday evening.

Olbermann began his piece by reminding his viewer that we were “tortures”. That as citizens in a free democratic republic of the people, by the people, and for the people we are responsible for the torture of prisoners committed in our name by our elected officials and those that worked for them. In other words, George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and others acting on our behalf committed war crimes.

Olbermann reminds us that what we did as a nation was in violation of at least four international treaties, as well as federal laws prohibiting the use of torture both domestically and overseas, regardless of the rationale behind it. Torture is wrong, pure and simple. It is counterproductive, produces unreliable intelligence, and aids in the recruitment of new terrorists. Worse, it lowers the moral stature of the United States and puts American lives, both military and civilian, at risk abroad.

I mean, how we can preach to other nations that torture is wrong when we condone it ourselves. As Olbermann makes clear, it is irrelevant that our elected officials acted illegally and without our knowledge, we are still complicit because they were our officials.

Olbermann uses a variety of examples when we didn’t remedy our national wrongs. He cites the Declaration of Independence (and I would add the Constitution) violated our national ideals by condoning slavery, only to have it return four score and seven years later as a basis for the Civil War. He gives other example from the Kaiser to Hitler, to McCarthyism to Watergate when those who ordered or committed their crimes we not held accountable, and how this desire to move forward led to even worse war crimes in the future.

I would also add Vietnam where we dropped more tons of bombs than in all the theaters of the Second World War. Not to mention Iran-Controgate, the violent over throw of democratically elected governments in Guatemala, Iran, Chili, Brazil, and a variety of countries around the world.

Olbermann’s point is that to move forward as a nation we must first clean up the wreckage of our past. He argues that only by the Obama Administration investigating and trying those responsible for the war crimes committed by the Bush Administration can we as a nation, and as individuals, begin to heal.

Moving forward is one thing; not remedying our past wrong is another. It has been said by someone much wiser than me that history is prologue, and that those who don’t learn from their past mistakes are doomed to repeat them in the future.

Worst of all, by not addressing our war crimes we will be setting a terrible precedent for our future leaders--that they are above the law, and show the rest of the world that all our talk of freedom and democracy is pure rhetoric and not to be believed.