As the era of the dark side recedes a little, my sense of the looming
reality is as follows. The men who ordered a man tied to a chair,
doused in water, and chilled to hypothermia so intense he had to be
rushed to emergency medical care, the men who presided over at least
two dozen and at most a hundred prisoners tortured to death,
the men who ordered an American servicewoman to smear fake menstrual
blood over a Muslim's face in order to win a war against Jihadism, the
men who ordered innocents stripped naked, sexually abused, terrified by
dogs, or cast into darkness with no possibility of a future, and did
all this in the name of the Constitution of the United States, the men
who gave the signal in wartime that there were no limits to what could
be done to prisoners of war and reaped a whirlwind of abuse and torture
that will haunt American service members for decades: these men will
earn the judgment of history. It will be brutal.
Andrew Sullivan on the end of the Bush years.