The saga continues

The disaster that is the George W. Bush presidency just grows worse and worse. Last week's revelation about the CIA's destruction of tapes showing the interrogations of top al-Qaida suspects — recordings said to show the use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques — further illustrates the danger of allowing the executive branch to dominate the other two branches of our government. Our employees, acting in our name, have violated U.S. and international law with impunity and are trying to cover it up. Look, the president took us to war on false pretenses and is threatening to attack another country that our spies think is not a nuclear threat, and the vice president thinks he's his own special branch of government not subject to the laws of the others. Is a pattern beginning to emerge? Finally the Congress is beginning to investigate, which it should have done years ago when the Republicans were in the majority. The very ideals of our country are at stake but our representatives could not look beyond party affiliation and blindly supported the Bush administration. But there is another hope: Maybe there are additional copies of recordings of the interrogation of al-Qaida suspects in 2002 that were destroyed by the CIA two years ago. Let's see what CIA Director Michael Hayden says about the affair when he testifies before Congress on Tuesday — if, of course, they can get him to tell the truth.