By Patricia Lee Sharpe
During his visit to the CIA campus yesterday, President Barack Obama got applause, big time, when he uttered the reassurance that agency operatives won’t be prosecuted for having followed orders to torture detainees in secret locales. (Nazi Adolph Eichmann must be turning in his grave.) White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel had already said the drafters of the legal arguments facilitating the harsh interrogation techniques now recognized as torture won’t be on the legal hook either.
The administration avers that legal action would be a hollow exercise in “looking back.” It would be—horrors!— an indulgence in “retribution.” It would, above all, distract from the “important” business of the day.
No kidding! That’s what we’re told.
Ordinary law-abiding people tend to think that prosecution for criminal wrongdoing is, indeed, a matter of wholly legitimate retribution, especially when the crime is a systematic subversion of the law itself. And since one can’t, even in today’s Constitutionally-handicapped America, prosecute people for what they haven’t already done (unless they are deemed to be “terrorists”), every court action does indeed involve looking back! As for the importance argument, now that the administration is using the out-and-out T word instead of euphemisms, how can prosecution not be on the agenda? I mean—it’s T-O-R-T-U-R-E, the most horrible thing a human being can do to another human being, except for outright killing.
When Japs and Jerries—to use those old WWII labels—did bestial things or ordered them to be done, their elaborate post-war attempts at exculpation didn’t save them from highly publicized trials and, once convicted, from imprisonment or hanging. Yet, when American officials torture under the one-size-fits-all-atrocities rubric of “national security,” the world is supposed to be satisfied by the Obama administration’s proposal to just “move on.”
When oh when will an American leader give us common folks (and all them furriners) credit for principled analysis and a little intelligence?
Meanwhile, the no prosecution line, which may or may not hold, means that the screamingly obvious paper trail that leads directly to the office of the Vice President and to President George W. Bush himself won’t be followed up either. This may be the unstated real reason for leaving the little guys alone. Prosecuting an ex-president would be a very serious business, but it may, ultimately, be necessary.
So you can understand why a nervous Dick Cheney is running around the country defending the Bush administration’s resort to “harsh methods” and his own role in pushing for and authorizing them. At this point, I suspect Cheney is more worried about the safety of his own hide than about the safety of America. He needs to keep up the scare tactics to reduce the likelihood of civil libertarians’ calls for retribution swelling into an irresistible mass movement.
However, the Spanish judge who successfully took on Chile’s Pinochet (a murder- and torture-enabler who is widely seen as having been an American client) is already looking with interest at the U.S. Justice Department lawyers and other Bush administration figures who crafted the legal doctrines that sicced CIA torturers on detainees.
The case is bound to threaten Spain's relations with the new administration in Washington, but Gonzalo Boyé, one of the four lawyers who wrote the lawsuit, said the prosecutor would have little choice under Spanish law but to approve the prosecution.
"The only route of escape the prosecutor might have is to ask whether there is ongoing process in the US against these people," Boyé told the Observer. "This case will go ahead. It will be against the law not to go ahead.
Meanwhile, we might examine the Obama administration’s bureaucratic argument for doing nothing about the torturers in our midst. The U.S. government can’t chew gum while walking, evidently.
Oh, puleeese! We citizen taxpayers are funding a dozen or so cabinet secretaries plus their political appointee underlings, to say nothing of the entire civil service employed in carrying out the mission of all those departments, in addition to the career foreign service and an enormous military establishment. We’re paying for czars of various sorts, who don’t come cheaply, and we’re supporting an executive office stuffed with aides and advisers, too. And yet there’s this constant worry that the Obama administration can’t take on issue X while dealing with issue Y. To say nothing of issue Z.
For instance, there was the big debate over whether the administration could deal with the economic crisis while reorienting our position in the world. If not, why do we have a State Department AND a Treasury Department?
But, but, but—maybe we can’t deal with finance and foreign affairs and still pursue health care reform. Then why do we also have a Department of Health and Human Services? And so on.
So, I ask you, what’s the Justice Department for anyway? Attorney General Eric Holder has done the right thing by releasing the terrorism memos. Now he needs to carry through, with or without the enthusiastic support of Barack Obama. If the “just following orders” defense didn’t persuade the distinguished judges presiding over the Nuremberg Trials, it still doesn’t hold potable water. Worse yet, a President who deliberately and repeatedly lied to American citizens about having turned the U.S. into a den of torturers has put himself in a category that deserves no mercy or respect from the people whose trust he betrayed. Let’s hope the ACLU keeps up the pressure. Those who torture or enable others to do so must never be beyond the reach of law, however painful the process.
And just in case Barack Obama lacks the courage to do the job, he might mull over this little possibility: would he prefer the Spanish to do it for us? How humiliating that would be.