I am afraid that Nick Kristoff has gone hysterical. He wants the winning candidate for president to immediately (if not sooner) upon election to appoint a Truth Commission like the one that brought a fragile peace to South Africa. What he is actually doing is making an analogy between the United States and apartheid South Africa, which was an intricate, systematic, intrinsically brutal and religious organization of white power against the vast majority of the country. Of course, when you can't think clearly you think in comparisons which are rarely, if ever, apt.
Kristof has fixed on Guantanomo as his chosen likeness to apartheid, as if the random (which does not mean especially rare) cruelties in
American prisons where terrorist suspects were held are at all comparable to a racial division of power, work, education, property and liberties that excluded no one. His other look-alikes are even more preposterous, if somewhat less evil: the inquiry into the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the Kerner Commission that examined the position of blacks in American society. God knows, if Kristoff believes the Kerner Commission was more research than rhetoric his intern has led him astray. Please go back and at least look at it, ole Nick, before you compare this with that.