It's not so important that the CIA agents or uniformed people
following orders to torture be prosecuted as that those who gave the
orders be. We can argue about whether that's right or wrong, but the
more important issue by far is to prosecute the Addingtons, Yoos,
Gonzales, Bybees, and any of the civilian political leaders who
sanctioned and promoted torture policy.
The political problem
is not external; it's internal. Most Americans and world opinion would
support these prosecutions. It would be a major plus from an public
relations image point of view. But public opinion is not nearly so
potent as internally entrenched Beltway power, which will do everything
it can to protect its own. And the Beltway establishment doesn't want
to put itself through this. Beltway power sanctioned the Clinton
impeachment as entertaining distraction about sex. But the Bush era
crimes were about power and money, and entrenched power will viciously
protect its prerogatives in those areas. That cuts too close to the
bone.
So yes, it's disappointing that Obama keeps talking about
looking forward and not backward. What kind of future will we have if
future government officials know that they can do anything they want
because they will never be prosecuted by Democrats whondon't have the
will to buck entrenched power to enforce the law?
But it
doesn't matter what Obama says; it matters what he does, and he did
something very important in his releasing those memos–he has given the
world the official smoking gun. And now that's done, this torture
business will take on a life of its own–special prosecutors,
congressional investigations, etc. It should be an even bigger deal
than Watergate. It should be, but that might be wishful thinking on my
part. We'll see.
The argument put out by Beltway types is simply
that releasing these memos or pursuing prosecutions will aid the
terrorists or weaken the country is ridiculous. Just hear it as
entrenched power saying what it can to protect its own–not the
country's–interests because it's obvious that not to prosecute is
weakness. The world already knows that we had an official torture
policy; they are waiting to see if we will repudiate it. We remain
weak so long as we refuse to take the steps to expunge it root and
branch. That can only be done if we show the world that the people who
designed this program will be prosecuted for war crimes and suitably
punished if convicted.
In his memo, Bybee pointed out that no one had ever been prosecuted
under the torture statutes on the books. A guy like this–a lawyer, and
now a Federal district judge–is a mockery of our country's commitment
to the rule of law. He should be the first prosecuted under the law he
so blithely dismissed.
***
UPDATE: Rahm Emmanuel
and everybody else who says we can't look backward with recrimination
about this torture business is clearly an accessory to a cover up. The
people who were behind designing and promoting this torture regime must
be flushed out and prosecuted.
Politics is hardly ever about
doing the right thing, and if it is it's because it coincides with a
particulaly powerful group. What Emmanuel is saying is that the price
to pay for outing torturers is too steep a price to pay, and I believe
he and everybody else who thinks so is miscalculating.
The
torturers are people who still have enormous power within the Beltway
system, and you can be sure they are using every bit of it to protect
themmselves. So the administration is fighting investigations on this
because they are feeling the heat from these power sources and hope it
will go away, but it miscalculates if it thinks it will go away. It
won't.
So stonewalling on this now is just going to make it
worse for the administration in the long run. At best it will look bad
in terms of its political judgment which will undermine its
trustworthiness, not just with the Democratic base, but with all decent
Americans. And at worst, it will appear as collusion with the
criminals who were behind this policy. No matter what the reasons for
adminstration resistance to getting to the bottom of this, it cannot be
successfully stonewalled, and it won't be.
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