We all bear responsibility for the historical memory of the nation. Meanwhile, back in the United States, denial remains our bipartisan creed. Old crimes continue to fester, perpetrators escape punishment and life afterward appears to go on as before. Yet no coverup ever works completely.
Historical memory is a restless ghost, a nervous tic, a constant threat.
It torments, especially, the major press. On these issues there is a distinctive style to what the big papers print, marked by compulsive restatement of half-truths and an equally compulsive failure to tie them together. What cannot come clean, won't go away. The Contras, the CIA and crack cocaine. The CIA's own Inspector General now concedes that the agency continued to work with cocaine traffickers tied to the Nicaraguan Contras, and by implication that the agency failed its moral obligation to bring these criminals to book.