By David Swanson

The United States of America owes much of the hope it has right now of remaining what John Adams called "a nation of laws, not men" to Italian law enforcement. Were it not for the fact that Italian prosecutors, unlike their American counterparts, answer to the law rather than a president, the enforcement of laws against a massive crime spree by U.S. officials (and their Italian accomplices) would not have begun.

In 2003, the CIA and the United States military kidnapped a man, a political refugee, in Italy. His name was Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar. Our CIA agents spied on him from their luxury hotels and gourmet-meal lives in Milano (all paid for by U.S. tax payers). They were told to kidnap Nasr and send him to Egypt to be tortured, and they did so. According to recent statements by two of them, they knew perfectly well they were violating the law. But they were not worried enough at the time to refrain from discussing the matter on their cell phones as they enjoyed the dolce vita and racked up credit card bills wasting the same currency our government claims it has a moral duty not to waste on healthcare.

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I know why you're here . . .

You're here because you know something. What you know is hard to explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with America. Something very wrong. You know what it is, but no one in power will do anything about it. And that frustrates you, your frustration is like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.

I know what you've been doing . . . why you hardly sleep, why you live the way you do, and why day after day, you read progressive blogs. You're looking for him. You're looking for a progressive leader. I know because I was once looking for the same thing. And when he found me, he told me I wasn't really looking for him. I was looking for the leadership within me, the leadership within each of us.

How do we achieve real change? It's the question that drives us. It's the question that brought you here. You know the question, just as I do.

But no one in power will ask it . . .

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Thunder on the mountain, and there's fires on the moon,
A ruckus in the alley and the sun will be here soon.

Or maybe not.

There’s been a ruckus in the alley for 30 years, but too many Democrats still keep bringing bouquets of bipartisan flowers to gun fights. They keep getting riddled with bullets, over and over again, but they still don’t seem to have a clue that their Bouquet of Bipartisan Flowers Strategy isn’t worth a flying fuck and never has been.

Thunder on the mountain, rollin' like a drum,
Gonna fight for change here, it's where the music’s coming from,
We don't need any guide, we already know the way . . .

Seeking the truth is the way. Seekers of truth are not conspiracy theorists, they are not purists, they don’t wear tinfoil fucking hats, they don’t need permission from Kos or anyone else to seek the truth about 9/11, about stolen elections, and about every other BushCo crime Cheney and his thugs keep high-fiving each other about while Eric Holder does nothing and Obama kisses the CIA’s ass and the Pentagon’s ass and the NSA’s ass and calls it change we can believe in.

I want justice we can believe in, I want accountability we can believe in, I want to hear thunder on the mountain like it's Judgment Day, I want to see every BushCo criminal prosecuted, convicted, and sent to prison.

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During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama liked to say that one voice can change a room, and if one voice can change a room, it can change a city, and if it can change a city, it can change a state, and if it can change a state, it can change a nation, and if it can change a nation, it can change the world.

Progressive bloggers already knew that. We spoke out against the criminal administration of Bush and Cheney when no one else would, because we’ve known all along how important one voice can be. That’s why we started blogging. We knew an entire nation had lost its way, we knew the corporate media was a wasteland of lies, but we knew one voice can make a difference, we knew that the voice of justice must be heard, so we became the voice of justice. We would not be silent while a war was unleashed for oil and profit, while war crimes were committed and elections were stolen and justice was crucified on a cross of gold.

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While the example of the Nuremberg Trials is used often these days to describe what prosecutions might look like, few seem to remember that the prosecution of war criminals after World War II was much larger and took place over a longer period of time than most people realize. This is important when one considers the context of President Obama's granting of immunity to lower-level CIA interrogators (if they acted in "good faith" upon "authoritative" legal advice).

What even a cursory examination of historical precedent demonstrates is that after World War II prosecution of war criminals and accessories to war crimes were not limited to the famous Nuremberg 22 high-level Nazis, nor the few hundred or so prosecuted through the Nuremberg tribunals, but thousands of accused throughout Europe.

What follows is a brief lesson in how these prosecutions occurred, who was involved, and where and when they took place. It may surprise you that the United States, for instance, has an Office of Special Investigations (OSI) at the US Department of Justice. Its mission was to hunt down war criminals and bring them to justice. Established only in 1979, the OSI has a sterling record:

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