Take yourself back to those days right after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Can you get in touch with those emotions you felt back then? I can. I can remember feeling a little bewildered, a little sad, a little scared, and a lot angry. To this day I can’t watch video of the planes flying into the Twin Towers without feeling a little sick in my stomach, and I have never been able to wipe away the images of those poor people who plunged to their deaths from the isolated uppermost floors of those burning buildings. I think we were in a collective state of shock, but not for long; I think we then turned our thoughts to vengeance. The vast majority of the American people wanted the military to hunt down and destroy the bastards who were responsible for this outrage.
When the U.S., backed by its NATO allies, invaded Afghanistan in pursuit of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda operatives, President Bush could count on the good will of most of the world. Even the Iranians provided us with intelligence and logistic assistance in the war against bin Laden’s Taliban protectors. Nations that were traditional enemies of the U.S. pledged their moral, and sometimes their material, support of our efforts to eradicate Al Qaeda. The world had given us a Good Guy Badge, and cheered us on to do what Good Guys do: get rid of the Bad Guys.
Unfortunately, the Bush regime was not composed of Good Guys. Their hearts were made of darker stuff than that of heroes (I’m looking at you, Dick Cheney). Given the moral authority to act, the Bushites used that authority to do immoral things – in this case, employing torture in the interrogation of confirmed or suspected Al Qaeda operatives.
(Perhaps counter-intuitively, my objection to torture has less to do with the victim than it has to do with the person responsible for inflicting harm. People who are capable of dispassionately causing pain to others kind of bother me.)
The Obama administration has released previously classified memos1 written by members of the Justice Department advising the Bush regime on which methods of torture could be used, and how they could be made to seem “legal”. In one of the memos, dated August 1, 2002, such things as “walling”, “facial slap (insult slap)”, and “insects placed in a confinement box” are mentioned alongside the now-infamous “waterboard”. The memo indicates that while the CIA wished to employ these harsh interrogation methods, the agency has “reviewed the relevant literature and found no empirical data on the effect of these techniques, with the exception of sleep deprivation.” I wonder what “relevant literature” was used.
The memos are an exercise in sophistry. The definition of torture under various statutes are parsed and dissected so that the Bush regime could make the case that what was happening wasn’t really torture. For example, waterboarding isn’t classified as torture because, even though “the subject’s body responds as if the subject were drowning… this procedure does not inflict physical harm.” However, because it did carry “the threat of imminent death”, further sophistry was needed to excuse the perpetrators. Because the person being waterboarded would be under immediate and temporary stress, and because nowhere could there be found any evidence of permanent or long-term psychological consequences, then waterboarding was not mental torture, either.
That’s history, and the new administration has announced that it will discontinue these techniques and close down the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay. But when it came to pursuing the persons responsible for turning the United States into a nation that uses torture, I was initially disappointed by President Obama, who upon releasing the memos stated that the CIA interrogators would not face criminal prosecution. But two days later, the President left the door open on going after the higher-ups of the Bush regime:
"For those who carried out some of these operations within the four corners of legal opinions or guidance that had been provided from the White House, I do not think it's appropriate for them to be prosecuted," he told reporters.
But then Obama added that prosecutions for those who drafted the memos would be up to Attorney General Eric Holder. "With respect to those who formulated those legal decisions, I would say that that is going to be more of a decision for the Attorney General within the parameters of various laws, and I don't want to prejudge that. I think that there are a host of very complicated issues involved there."2
I believe President Obama is going to go after the Bush regime cronies who instituted and justified the use of torture. But it’s going to be relatively quiet, the process one of slow and steady progress toward trial, for two reasons, both of them legitimate under the circumstances: the economy must still be his number one priority, and he cannot be seen to be carrying out a Democratic vendetta against the former Republican administration.
I hope that my prediction comes to fruition, because an America that uses torture has lost its right to stand as a champion of human rights in the world. True, we don’t really let our concern for human rights interfere with our realpolitik; but even an illusion can be a powerful force in a world of dictators and maniacs. Remember that it wasn’t missiles or tanks or aircraft carriers that finally did in the Soviet Union. What toppled the “Evil Empire” was freedom – social, economic, intellectual freedom. We were the Good Guys then. We can be again. But that will mean putting our own Bad Guys on trial, and in jail. Let’s hope Sheriff Obama is up to the challenge of cleaning up our Rock Ridge.
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1Available at http://www.aclu.org/safefree/general/olc_memos.html
2Source: http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/04/21/1901775.aspx
2 comments:
Don't insult Harvey Korman like that.
What also toppled the Evil Empire was that the US outspent the USSR 10 to 1 on it's military.
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