The precedent of a torturing American president must be reversed. That means it cannot be allowed to stand. –Andrew Sullivan
President Obama can talk all he wants about not looking back, but this grotesque past is bigger than even he is. It won’t vanish into a memory hole any more than Andersonville, World War II internment camps or My Lai. The White House, Congress and politicians of both parties should get out of the way. We don’t need another commission. We don’t need any Capitol Hill witch hunts. What we must have are fair trials that at long last uphold and reclaim our nation’s commitment to the rule of law. –Frank Rich
This is bigger than Obama or anybody else, and it will take on–it already has taken on–a life of its own. Nothing in the memos Obama released tells people who have been paying attention what they did not already know. It's just official now, and the media can't ignore it anymore, no matter how much David Broder or Peggy Noonan wish they would.
The future of American politics will be largely determined by which side of this issue you are on. The mentality of the people who defend torture deserves only contempt. It is a mentality rooted in fear, rather than courage and poise, and it is dishonorable for any of us to let our fears get the better of us. This kind of thinking can be given no quarter. To paraphrase Shepherd Smith: We're Americans, and we don't torture.
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UPDATE: I was listening to Cokie Roberts on NPR this morning and then read Greenwald's piece on John Meacham about how only the hard left wants investigations and prosecutions on this torture horror. Meacham thinks that it would be a bad precedent. Let's hope this evolves in such a way that some day he will re-read what he wrote about this issue and be mortified. The fatuousness of every argument proposed to defend or overlook what has happened regarding U.S. torture policy is obvious to anybody who lives outside the influence of the Beltway bubble.
I don't think these torture defenders are bad people; I just think they really don't do much more than to reflect the groupthink within their "set". These are smart, ambitious people, but their career success has depended not on their independent, principled thinking but on their ability to become what their bosses were looking for, and their bosses rose to their positions of power and influence by proving that they will be defenders of the existing paradigm of power and influence. It's just common sense–well-established systems of power filter out anybody who poses the least threat to it. Challenge that paradigm, and your career dead-ends. We all know that this is the way it works, and that's why we should take the opinions of these careerists as being hardly worthy of our attention.
And so what is the worth of their opinion that prosecuting torturers is a bad precedent? The fatuousness of such thinking can only be measured by how it costs us in other ways. How as a precedent does it compare against the precedent of designing an official torture policy? Why isn't that a problem for these people? Do they really believe the mentality that gave birth to this policy will go away if we just look the other way? It's become a right-wing talking point that torture should be used if it works–and it will become official policy if the GOP gets into power again any time soon. How does this bad precedent of prosecuting torturers compare against the cost of destroying whatever good will and moral leadership this country enjoyed in the eyes of the world? How does it compare against the cost of not regaining it and our honor unless we go through a lawful process which demonstrates to the world that we are a nation that respects the rule of law and not the rule of elites?
The integrity of the Beltway pundits can be evaluated on where they come down on this issue. Any one of them who defends torture or who defends the idea of "moving on" makes clear to the rest of us that they just don't get it, most likely because they care more about their status among the power elite than they care about principle or the precedent we should all truly be caring about. They can go into deep denial about this but the rest of the world outside their bubble will not.
Were the people in this "set" complaining about what a bad precedent it was to impeach Bill Clinton for a relative triviality? No, that was ok. That was good entertainment, and their bosses loved it. But the bosses don't like it when the ugly truth about how power operates in this country and who wields it is exposed to the public. So all the courtiers now are circling the wagons. What a nauseating spectacle. The sooner new media puts these big media moral infantilists out of business the better.
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