I like Dalia Lithwick

On Rachel Maddow's show last night, she made a pretty good point about all this fuss about the ins and outs of will-he-or-won't-he wrt the prosecution of Bush and co. for war crimes:

LITHWICK: Well, one of things that‘s so intriguing to me about this whole conversation we‘re having and as you point out, we had it on in the New York Times on the op-ed page, as though this is an open legal question. Crimes happen. Should we prosecute or not?

You know, this is a really thorny one. And one of things that I think is really interesting about this conversation is that as you say, this isn‘t a legal conversation. If we were talking about a bank robbery and the arguments against prosecuting we‘re, “Oh, well, these people were really stressed out. It was a crisis. They didn‘t think they were breaking the law. Let bygones be bygones. Let‘s just turn the page.”

You‘d laugh at me. This is not a legal conversation. This is a pragmatic conversation, a political conversation and that‘s fine. As a legal matter I don‘t think there‘s no question and I cited to it in my “Time” piece this week. Laws have been broken. There are war crimes that have been committed. It seems that, as you say, at least three people were waterboarded. The ACLU has collected over 100,000 pages of documents linking the White House to torture policy. It‘s on their Web site. It‘s has now come out in a book.