I did a piece for the Emirati English-language paper The National about U.S. war crimes in the war on terror, hooking off Taguba's j'accuse:

But perhaps [Taguba] indictment of the Bush administration and its conduct becomes all the starker by his refusal to explain or qualify his remarks. Unfortunately, the few mainstream US media outlets that did cover the release of the PHR report largely declined to mention Taguba’s “war crimes” remarks. But inside Washington’s national-security and intelligence community – the people whom the Bush administration ordered to, in some cases, violate both their consciences and the law – some viewed Taguba’s judgment as a clarion call for the country to come to terms with what has been done in its name, even if they express scepticism that such a reckoning will actually occur.

“Does it show America to be a maturing nation?” mused Martin Lederman, an attorney who worked for the Justice Department’s influential Office of Legal Counsel from 1999 to 2002. “Yes, slightly.” But will it make any difference? After all, John McCain, the Republican nominee for president – and America’s most prominent torture survivor – believes the CIA should retain the right to torture detainees even as he opposes the continued use of such tactics by the military. “Not unless the next Administration takes steps to repudiate the CIA’s torture techniques and the legal opinions underlying them,” Lederman notes.

Malcolm Nance agrees. “The implications of General Taguba’s remarks are profound, but will never be acted upon,” said Nance, who has spent 25 years as part of the intelligence and Special Forces communities pursuing al Qa’eda and other terrorist groups. “The procedures and techniques that the Bush administration has selected to ‘take the gloves off’ in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks were a headlong leap into choosing criminal acts over a forceful but dignified response.”