Here’s something new in the history of Booman Tribune. My father sent along a link and suggested that I should discuss it on the blog. My Dad is not what most people would consider a left-winger. At least, not consistently, and not for at least half of my life. I can’t really describe his politics concisely and I don’t want to invade his privacy. I’ll just say that he was furious with Nixon for being a criminal and with Ford for pardoning him, but he adopted more of a ‘pox on both their houses’ attitude during my teenage years and most of my twenties. I’d describe his attitude as more libertarian during this period, but not in any doctrinaire way. As best as I can tell, the Terri Schiavo episode served as kind of a last straw. I can recall him saying things that were at least somewhat sympathetic to George W. Bush during his first term. I have never heard a kind word about Republicans from him since 2005. In that sense, he and I have been politically simpatico for the entire lifetime of this blog. Still, he’s not the type to send me links or emails about politics. So, what motivated him to do it now?
He read Larry Siems piece in Slate about what he learned after reading 140,000 (formerly) classified documents about America’s abuse of prisoners since 2001.
Here is what I learned.
Our highest government officials, up to and including President Bush, broke international and U.S. laws banning torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. Worse, they made their subordinates in the military and civilian intelligence services break those laws for them.
When the men and women they asked to break those laws protested, knowing they could be prosecuted for torture, they pretended to rewrite the law. They commissioned legal opinions they said would shield those who carried out the abuses from being hauled into court, as the torture ban requires. “The law has been changed,” detainees around the world were told. “No rules apply.”
Then they tortured. They tortured men at military bases and detention centers in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Guantánamo, and in U.S. Navy bases on American soil; they tortured men in secret CIA prisons set up across the globe specifically to terrorize and torture prisoners; they sent many more to countries with notoriously abusive regimes and asked them to do the torturing. At least twice, after the torturers themselves concluded there was no point to further abuse, Washington ordered that the prisoners be tortured some more.
They tortured innocent people. They tortured people who may have been guilty of terrorism-related crimes, but they ruined any chance of prosecuting them because of the torture. They tortured people when the torture had nothing to do with imminent threats: They tortured based on bad information they had extracted from others through torture; they tortured to hide their mistakes and to get confessions; they tortured sometimes just to break people, pure and simple.
And they conspired to cover up their crimes.
I’ve written countless articles about this issue. None of this comes as news to me. I wish that the Obama administration had called this criminal activity what it was and had basically defined the modern GOP a party of war criminals. I wish we had had our own version of the Nuremberg Trials to hold people accountable, up to and including Condi Rice, Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and George W. Bush.
I understand why this was not done. I understand that Obama had a positive agenda that he wanted to pursue. I understand that he couldn’t have it all. He had to make choices. By letting the torturers off the hook, he was able to address the economic crisis, enact a health care bill, and pass through the most substantial legislative agenda in generations. He was able to avoid ripping this country completely apart. But there was a cost, too. A big cost. We did not erase this stain from our history. He did not pursue justice. And the GOP just mutated into an even more aggressively stupid and dangerous organization.
I think, also, that failing to shine a bright light on the abuses of our foreign policy during the Bush years prevented an awakening of the American people that might have prevented Obama from continuing some of those practices. Not torture, mind you, but more unending war in Afghanistan, more invasive surveillance, more assertions of executive power and the right to secrecy. He also lost the moral authority, based on domestic outrage, that would have allowed him to steamroll Congress into closing Gitmo.
Obama paid a price for letting the torturers go. But so did we. And so did our country’s reputation, both now and in the history books.