I had no idea.

I knew John Yoo was a Berkeley law professor. That's his day job. A lot of these other neocon skunks collect checks from anywhere they can--think tanks, cable news appearances, and op-ed contributions (the going rate for this ex-Senator is more than I can command with my four-piece jazz band for five hours). If they're big enough, they just start their OWN think tank, like Rummy did. And if they're complete losers, well, I'm just not sure what Alberto Gonzales is doing these days.

But one of the original Torture Neocons walks free despite his crimes against humanity, and that's John Yoo's boss--Jay Bybee. Those two names are hard to forget, and will never be historically dis-associated with our nation's worst hour. As it should be.

No, not only is he free, his day job came as a complete surprise to me today, via Atrios.

The Nuremberg Trials brought justice to tools like these some years after the fact. And according to "Judgment At Nuremberg", most of those not sentenced to death or life imprisonment were given fairly light sentences. If you sent thousands to death but didn't pull the trigger, five years was the average time served, even for the capo of the Nazi 'justice' system.

But these are our own. These men authorized torture. They committed both U.S. and international crimes. Reconciliation is unnecessary. Who would we be placating--a miserable German population already ground under the heel of World War II?

No. By not prosecuting Bybee and Yoo and Rummy and Cheney and Bush and Rice and Hayden and the rest of the gang, we are placating the FOX News crowd. Them and them alone.

I'm in the hospital, reading my yellowed 1209-page copy of Shogun. The second protagonist, a 17th-century Japanese warlord named Toranaga, is the master of manipulation. He is, it seems, the only one who keeps his head when all around him everyone else, including his devoted (and one treacherous) generals forget everything they ever learned from childhood taught in Sun Tzu's The Art Of War. Karma.

I was reminded of this when thinking about the outrage from the right blogosphere over the release of a report about extreme right wing terrorism and its potential here in America. Of course, the report was ordered and compiled and studied and written on George W. Bush's orders, but since its conclusions do not match the neocons' talking points, it is suffering, shall we say, denunciation? Good word choice. We'll go with that.

But I couldn't help but wonder...did Obama or someone working for him or sympathetic with his policies or even someone with a brain actually 1) give this to a reporter or 2) leak it to them? I'm not even sure if it's in the public domain; it's probably not Top Secret, etc. But someone made a decision, somewhere, to put this into the news cycle, and I think it was probably a Bush Republican, one way or another. Just to sell papers and clicks.

As has been noted by any lefty blogger with a brain, this is a tempest in a teapot, albeit not nearly as hilarious as the priceless 'teabag parties'. But something like this never, ever just 'happens'. Either someone is using it as another red herring to stir the masses, or possibly even an Obama sympathizer actually wanted this story in order to warn the public.

But I don't like being manipulated. I'd rather be the Toranaga guy. And sometimes it's just so easy to see, like trout lurking at the bottom of a Montana spring stream. You have to look, you have to know where to look, but they're there.

And if you don't know where to look, or you're even oblivious to their existence...a lot of people belong in that category.

President Obama has released the Bush torture memos he promised, after one delay, after much hand-wringing by those who doubted he would--myself included.

I'm in the hospital, so I'm going to wait until the flotsam and jetsam of the blogosphere settles to see whether this is a judicious moment or not, and not because I have anything against President Obama. Because it's a very important issue to me. And it should be, to every American.

It's a good first step, and a campaign promise kept. But it's only the beginning, in my opinion.