As we learn, again, of the horrors of the CIA’s interrogations during the war in Iraq, it is easy to get caught up in the moral disgust that the images generate.

But in that revulsion, we are missing one important aspect of this sorry episode in our great nation’s history: For four years, the truth about what was actually happening at the CIA’s “Black Sites” was kept from President Bush.

An August 2002 report on the interrogation program was never presented to the president, and details of the torture methods withheld from him for four years, until 2006 when he “expressed discomfort” at the pictures. By then, the damage was done.

My questions are: Who played the president of the United States for a stooge? Who felt such a need to lash out in anger that they would break the moral code of all civilized peoples, forget the law? Who would manipulate our president and lie to our Congress to hide torture and murder at the hands of “government contractors”?

There are myriad lessons for us in the Senate report as well as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The one we seem too uncomfortable to address is: Who really runs this country, and how do we take it back?

Bob Sessums

North Yarmouth