Torture and its aftermath
Two things are clear from yesterday's speeches by President Barack Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney.
1. There are wide differences in our understanding of the facts surrounding America's policy of torturing detainees. Were these practices necessary or effective? If so, why did President George Bush stop using them after 2004? Were they legal or moral? If so, should they be used going forward to protect our nation?
2. To sort out these questions, the U.S. needs a formal investigation, conducted by an independent panel or prosecutor with full subpoena power and the highest security clearances. It should be made clear from the outset that if Americans violated our own laws, they may be subject to prosecution or other sanctions.
It's now clear that President Obama's "don't look back" approach is wrong-headed, given the gravity of this situation.
Anyone who believed that the Monica Lewinsky/Whitewater matter -- or Iran-Contra -- deserved a full investigation can hardly feel otherwise about these allegations.
A word about language: I've become convinced that waterboarding is torture.
But even if one quibbles about waterboarding, it's also been proved beyond any doubt that America deliberately handed detainees into the custody of third-party countries when we knew that they would be tortured.
America's intelligence community -- with Bush Administration sanction -- clearly decided that
torture was a necessary strategy to keep the country safe.
The question now is what do we as a democratic society do about that fact?
posted by Brian Mann @ 5/22/2009 10:23:00 AM
5 Comments
5 Comments:
No one in our contry should stand above the law - certainly not leaders of our executive branch.
Brian writes: "America's intelligence community -- with Bush Administration sanction -- clearly decided that
torture was a necessary strategy to keep the country safe."
Possibly. It's also becoming clearer that Cheney urged torture to extract confessions, false ones, showing an Al-Qaeda-Saddam-WMD link that never existed. So the country had an excuse to invade Iraq.
More reason for a full investigation.
This is a damned if we do, damned if we don't question.
Of course, people shouldn't torture people.
Perhaps we should have the same policy on torture as we do for gays in the military - don't ask, don't tell.
Justice is not what it is cracked up to be. We all want justice for someone else (meaning hang them high) while we want mercy for ourselves.
I say no to any investigation, the same thing I said about prosicuting Nixon.
Ever since I saw the first Guantanamo Bay detainees being led hooded, in shackles to cages like animals and on through the publication of the Abu Graib photos, I've been nagged by a sneaking suspicion that the torture, the ridicule, the humiliation was more about punishment than it ever was about obtaining information.
It was also about making "them" fear us. Of course, there will be blowback. Sayyid Qutb was tortured in Egypt in the 1960s and then wrote two tracts which became the foundation of Al Qaeda's ideology. Then he was executed, and in the eyes of radicals, martyred.
For a good look at how truth commissions and investigations worked in Rwanda (surprisingly well), check out this New Yorker article: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/04/090504fa_fact_gourevitch
Post a Comment
<< Home