Even a broken clock is right twice a day, so it was only a matter of time that this broken administration did something right.
Now let us do something right and follow Mandela's lead and set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Mandela off U.S. terrorism watch list
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Former South African President Nelson Mandela is to be removed from a U.S. terrorism watch list under a bill President Bush signed Tuesday.
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South Africa's apartheid government had designated the ANC a terrorist organization during the group's decades-long struggle against whites-only rule. Its members have been barred from receiving U.S. visas without special permission, and the bill Bush signed will lift that requirement, State Department spokesman Tom Casey said.
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Mandela shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 with F. W. de Klerk, the South African president and National Party leader who worked with Mandela to end apartheid. Mandela replaced him as president in 1994 and served until 1999.
When Mandela took office he did a daring and wonderful thing: His administration created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission allowed the truth to come out and allowed the country to become truly free and not prisoner of its past. Bitterness and resentment are natural, and if not allowed to be aired and understood these feelings would fester and much of South Africa's early post-apartheid years would have been about nothing but revenge, scapegoating, and witch hunts. South Africa is a success story (though it does have problems) while Zimbabwe is a disaster. The anger towards white farmers (both just and unjust) in Zimbabwe was to a large degree the reason that a country once considered the bread basket of Africa can no longer feed its own citizens.
Yes the TRC granted amnesty to some (849), but to most it was refused (5,392).
We need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission here.
No the Bush era is not any where on a scale of the South African apartheid era, but it is one of the darkest periods in America.
They plundering of our treasury, the lost of our young men and women for a war of choice, the involvement of corporations in the writing of laws and in the development of foreign policy (and war plans), the botched investigations, torture, terror warnings as political tools, the conversion of government bureaucracies into political apparatuses - this all (and so so much more) needs to be exposed. We don't know how bad it was. Here at TCS we are constantly and sadly startled to realize how much of our most cynical early appraisals of the Bush administration were conservative and that that lot was more corrupt and inept then we ever thought.
Americans need to know all of this, so hopefully it is less likely to happen again. We need to know the extent of this. If that means some of the criminals of the Bush administration (and even Bush or Cheney themselves) go free then so be it. The truth will be out, and our nation stronger and more free because of that. That should in the long run be more satisfying then revenge. And remember this isn't all going to be about Bush, there are too many Democrats who willingly looked away to not let their lack of courage and complicity to not be recorded in our history books.
For more detail on my feelings about a TRC please read my earlier post: Impeach Now or Truth and Reconciliation Commissions later. That post as well as this post are also cross-posted at my web site This Century Sucks.