Mr. Bush says without amnesty, the government won’t get cooperation in the future. We don’t buy it. The real aim is to make sure the full story of the illegal wiretapping never comes out in court.

At a time when so many problems have arisen outside the limits of existing federal insurance programs, we need to do more than update the programs for inflation. We need to consider the fundamental principles on which they were based, stress-test them for today’s environment and consider extending them in creative ways.

“You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett wrote in a letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders six years ago. Unfortunately, this crisis’s outgoing tide has exposed some of the nation’s most esteemed institutions. Naked truths like these are never a pretty sight. And even after the tide comes back in, they are not likely to be soon forgotten.

Recent intelligence analysis indicated that Al Qaeda was now operating in the tribal areas with an impunity similar to the freedom that it had in Afghanistan before the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

In Nakuru, furious mobs rule the streets, burning homes, brutalizing people and expelling anyone not in their ethnic group, all with complete impunity. On Saturday, hundreds of men prowled a section of the city with six-foot iron bars, poisoned swords, clubs, knives and crude circumcision tools. Boys carried gladiator-style shields and women strutted around with sharpened sticks. The police were nowhere to be found.

The bank’s management has come under increasing pressure from French officials to provide a more detailed accounting of how Mr. Kerviel could have racked up such enormous losses by himself, over a year, without raising any red flags among either his supervisors or the bank’s internal auditors. Mr. Bouton described Mr. Kerviel’s elaborate efforts to hide his activities as being like a “mutating virus.” ... Within six hours, Mr. Kerviel’s losses swelled by 1.4 billion euros.