Monday, April 20, 2009

Knot in My Stomach

The mainstream media have picked up the torture story and they're out for blood. Last Thursday, the New York Times called for the impeachment of Jay S. Bybee, author of one of the OLC torture memos and now a judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (Bush appointee, natch). Now there are pieces from the LA Times, Boston Globe and UK's Guardian that advocate full disclosure of what the Bush administration authorized around torture and how it was managed. The LA Times editorial also supports Obama's decision not to prosecute those officers who administered torture under orders from higher up, who believed their actions to be legal based on those flimsy OLC memos.

Check this out from Obama's senior adviser, David Axelrod, said on CBS's Face the Nation last week:

SMITH: On the other hand, groups like the ACLU and others have said this proves there are prosecutable crimes that need to be acted on. What's your response to that?

AXELROD: Well, the president has said, if there were agents of the United States government acting on legal advice that what they were doing was legal and appropriate, that they should not be prosecuted. If people acted outside the law, that's a different issue. But the main point is the president has banned these enhanced interrogation techniques. We have turned the page on this episode in our history. We have so many challenges in front of us, in terms of our national security, our relations in the world. And remember, these techniques, far from enhancing our safety, really become a recruiting and propaganda tool for Al Qaida and the extremists around the world. We're moving past all of that. And to revisit it again and again and again isn't, in the president's view, in the country's interest.

The problem with this for me, however, is that full disclosure ought to lead to prosecutions if crimes were committed. We are not talking about lying about getting blowjobs when giving testimony in a civil case. We are talking about a system-wide culture that said torture is authorized, that breaking the law is okay, that killing anyone is on the table in order to protect Americans from terrorist attack. The decisions by Bush and Cheney, supported by their lawyers, has altered the course of American foreign policy, perhaps forever. It is now indisputable that George Bush broke the law and violated his oath of office by ordering the torture of prisoners.

Now, the International Committee of the Red Cross notified President Bush in February 2007 that it believed his administration was engaging in torture. By law and by treaty, Bush was required to investigate, but he never did. So now it's up to Obama to do so.

Obama can travel all over the world and proclaim that has put an end to the torture and rendition programs, shut down Guantanamo (but let's not forget he's keeping Bagram open), and has released details about the Bush torture program. But if Obama says that he will let the perpetrators of these crimes skate without prosecution (indeed, some of them will probably go on to earn hefty speaker's fees on the lecture circuit), then what Obama is doing is also against the law.

The idea that Obama is trying to pull a Gerald Ford and move the country past this dark period is deeply troubling to me. At the very least, if he's not going to prosecute, then open up everything and disclose everything. And if anyone who participated in those acts, by commission of the acts themselves or authorizing them to be committed, are still working for the United States government, then absolutely those individuals should at the very least lose their jobs, perhaps their pensions, and should be prohibited for life from becoming lobbyists for any company that contracted defense and/or intelligence work for the government.

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