New Torture Revelations

Hi everyone,

Blogspot locked up my blog for a few days - something made them think this was a spam blog. Anyway, I'm back.

I've been wanting to write something about the CIA report released yesterday. Its not so much that this information is new, although some of what the CIA did in our names is truly horrifying. However, I was reading Andrew Sullivan's blog this morning, and he expressed my feelings perfectly - so I'll let him speak for me.

Andrew Sullivan, August 25, 2009:

"This is what Bush and Cheney truly achieved in their tragic response to 9/11: two terribly failed, brutally expensive wars, the revival of sectarian warfare and genocide in the Middle East, the end of America's global moral authority, the empowerment of Iran's and North Korea's dictatorships, and the nightmares of Gitmo and Bagram still haunting the new administration.

But what they did to the culture - how they systematically dismantled core American values like the prohibition on torture and respect for the rule of law - is the worst and most enduring of the legacies.

One political party in this country is now explicitly pro-torture, and wants to restore a torture regime if it regains power. Decent conservatives for the most part simply looked the other way. Unless these cultural forces in defense of violence and torture are defeated - not appeased or excused, but defeated - America will never return the way it once was. Electing a new president was the start and not the end of this. He is flawed, as every president is, but in my view, the scale of the mess he inherited demands some slack. Any new criminal investigation which scapegoats those at the bottom while protecting the guilty men and women who made it happen is a travesty of justice. If it is the end and not the beginning of accountability, it will be worse than nothing.

But it need not be the end of the story. Indeed, it can be the beginning if we make it so. We cannot stop this sad and minuscule attempt to restore a scintilla of accountability to some individuals low down on the totem pole. Eric Holder is doing what he can. But we can continue to lobby and argue for the extension of accountability to the truly guilty men who made all this happen and still refuse to take responsibility for war crimes on a coordinated scale never before seen in American warfare, and initiated by a presidential decision to withdraw from the Geneva Conventions and refuse to abide by their plain meaning and intent.

Our job, in other words, is to raise the core moral baseline of Americans to that of Iranians. That's the depth of the hole Cheney dug. And it's a hole the current GOP wants to dig deeper and darker."

Thanks Andrew.

Let me also add that I wholeheartedly agree that Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to limit the special prosecutor's investigation to CIA officials who went beyond what was authorized by the OLC "torture memos" is a grave mistake. First, the memoranda produced by the office of legal counsel contained badly flawed legal analysis - so badly flawed that only a complete ignoramus could have relied on it in good faith. Consider just the fact that the memoranda authorized waterboarding without ever mentioning that this conduct had been repeatedly prosecuted by our own government. Not one government official, either within the CIA or without, genuinely believed that chaining people in stress positions, naked, in a 54 degree room, was legal conduct. The idea that they acted in good faith is absurd.

Not only is it absurd, it is refuted by the CIA report itself, which discusses the worries of particular CIA officials that the conduct they were engaged in would lead to future prosecutions. You only worry about prosecutions when you think what you're doing is illegal.

Second, and far more important, allowing the torture memoranda from the OLC to immunize government officials from prosecution, despite the fact that these memoranda were so obviously flawed, will cement the proposition that the President is a law unto himself - that the executive can exempt itself from any laws passed by congress simply by appointing a lackey to the OLC and instructing him or her to write a legal memorandum stating that whatever he wants to do is legal.

If we accept that precedent - we're done. Its just a matter of time.

Joe H.