Moving beyond torture
by Robert Philbin
[ opinion - may 09 ]
"Water boarding is torture," Attorney General nominee Eric Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 15, 2009. "If you look at the history of the use of that technique, used by the Khmer Rouge, used in the inquisition, used by the Japanese and prosecuted by us as war crimes. We prosecuted our own soldiers for using it in Vietnam." He said.
All-in-all, a pretty good week for President Obama and his administration. The bad news is his wars are worsening on all fronts and the economy may be bottoming out, but it feels like pain to many as the bottom nears. The good news is Mr Obama appears responsive to political pressure, especially from his loyal progressive base. The last thing the nation needs right now is a premature end to the Obama honeymoon, but that end appears looming if he cannot move beyond the torture issue.
The energetic President appeared frayed mid-week when he introduced visiting Jordan King Abdullah II to the White House press. In response to a question of whether to bring charges against those who devised legal justification for torture, he said, "That's going to be more of a decision for the attorney general, within the parameters of various laws, and I don't want to prejudge that," a distinct shift from the usual - "looking forward is always more fun than confronting war crimes" - rhetoric.
Torture doesn't work so why use it? It doesn't garnish intelligence (ask anybody with any experience), but it does elicit any response the torturer might require for whatever purpose. For example, a response like, "Yes, I met with Saddam Hussein to plot all the attacks on New York City and develop a suitcase nuclear bomb! Now please stop water-boarding me!"
When you're desperate to masquerade an incredibly destructive war for oil in Iraq as a war against al Qaida in Iraq, every little confession of terror or weapons of mass destruction helps.
Dick Cheney, a lingering tumor for an exhausted GOP, has filed a "right to know" request for his own memos in his own file cabinet which he says will prove that torture was as efficacious under his administration as it was in Spain in 1478, under Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. (Within a couple of years, 5,000 Jews confessed to being Jewish and 700 were burned alive.) Torture always works when you need a signed confession, as opposed to reasonably accurate and actionable intelligence.
"One of the things that I find a little bit disturbing about this recent disclosure is that they put out the legal [torture] memos," Cheney whined to a chubby hack commentator this week, "but they didn't put out the memos that show the success of the effort [to torture]."
Remember those grainy North Korean videos of tortured American soldiers staring worn and confused into the camera, confessing, like broken zombies, to war crimes they were ordered to commit by President Eisenhower? How about those tortured downed American fighter pilots in North Vietnamese film footage, confessing to war crimes, like the napalming of children, blankly focused on written instructions off camera? That's the precise moral level to which the Bush Administration and the CIA, driven mostly by Mr Cheney, have reduced The United States of America.
"There are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this [torture] activity. " Mr Cheney continued. "They have not been declassified. I formally ask that they be declassified now." Like any citizen, Cheney has a right, under US law, to access public information.
Meanwhile, Mr Obama defended those cowards who tortured and killed in Secretary Rumsfeld's corporate gestapo at Abu Ghraib. He sympathized with those legally misinformed, but nonetheless loyal bureaucratic inquisitors, still employed by the CIA, when he claimed they were "boxed in by legal interpretations," again preferring to move forward rather than recalibrate America's morally stubborn resistance to abusive executives like Mr Bush and his prissy, effete thugs - Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tenet, Rove, Rice and Libby, to name but a few.
So it all comes down in the end, as we all knew it would, to one man, the Attorney General of the United States.
Mr Eric H Holder, Jr, a New Yorker born and bred, Stuyvesant High School, Columbia Law, is now publicly faced with the obvious. He has no option but appoint a special prosecutor to investigate charges of high crimes of torture under US and international law, or promptly resign office. The alternative of no action, or evasive action on so core an issue, will signal the end of the Obama Administration honeymoon, the end to "change we can believe in" for the American public.
This is why Mr Cheney fights on so publicly. He knows his gig is up if Washington power bases crumble and open up a full investigation into his operations. But yet again he has arrogantly diminished the influence of the American people.
This issue has become important now, somehow germane in fact, despite Washington's natural aversion to the pursuit of justice, because as the economy worsens, undermining public faith in government as well as financial and corporate institutions, and, as the Obama war strategy falters, the result of "more of the same" following years of Bush-Cheney incompetence in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the American public will begin to reject Washington DC as the center of moral and legal leadership, further accelerating America's domestic decline. There is something of this regional deconstruction in the absurd Texas and Alaska 'secessionist' movements. A new grass roots coalition is taking shape out there and it won't be pleasant to the status quo.
The core national principal of "America, a nation of laws not men" was fundamental to the American Revolution, the US Constitution and it remains essential to continued public support for Mr Obama and his administration - support without which no president can govern effectively in Washington. We survived Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra and the Clinton impeachment by adherence to legal process over individuals, no matter how powerful.
Gallup polling two months ago (well before the recent memos and Red Cross disclosures) [1] found 63% of Americans wanted "investigations of Bush Administration use of torture." By party, 44% of Republicans approved investigations in February, 59% of Independents and 80% of Democrats also favored torture investigations. No doubt we'll see similar polling in the coming week.
Indeed, the president's "plate is very full" and indeed he has "much bigger fish to fry" but he and his administration are at least for the moment existentially trapped in history. Torture appears a lingering intolerable malaise which has become the first serious challenge to the Obama presidency. Mr Holder fully recognizes this political reality, so it will be enormously interesting to observe the new attorney general navigate his future over the next week or so.
Notes
1 Most favor investigations into terror techniques, possible abuse of Justice Dept (Gallup poll).
Note: Cheney popularity remains at an all-time low: Little Change in Negative Images of Bush and Cheney. [Back]
