Professor Slaughter is perhaps at her best when she says ''Americans are no better (and no worse) than anyone else. We have no right to moralize, and we have much to learn from others.'' Few Americans in positions of influence actually say this. So, thanks for making this important point, although I suspect you will make few new friends within the Beltway. My point is that I am old enough to remember the Rockefeller Commission, the Church Committee and the Pike Committee set up in the mid-to-late 1970s following the publication of a report by Seymour Hersch. The US intelligence community has earned a lot of plaudits since 1947, but if you go by the revelations flowing from those investigations nearly four decades old now, you have to conclude that the assumption of infallibility, probity and righteousness has continued to run deep since then.

