The NY Times calls for the investigation of Team Cheney Torture Awesome Force GO! which should be major news. It’s not, and in fact the depressing part is that it’s close to meaningless.
The question everyone will want answered, of course, is: Who should be held accountable? That will depend on what an investigation finds, and as hard as it is to imagine Mr. Obama having the political courage to order a new investigation, it is harder to imagine a criminal probe of the actions of a former president.
But any credible investigation should include former Vice President Dick Cheney; Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington; the former C.I.A. director George Tenet; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers who drafted what became known as the torture memos. There are many more names that could be considered, including Jose Rodriguez Jr., the C.I.A. official who ordered the destruction of the videotapes; the psychologists who devised the torture regimen; and the C.I.A. employees who carried out that regimen.
That’s great and all, but as I said last week:
So yeah, solid majorities in favor of “enhanced interrogation techniques” because “they work”, and “got us intelligence we could not have otherwise gotten”, and that the Senate Democrats should never have released the damn report at all.
Also, 47% found the report unfair to the CIA, and 57% think there should be no charges against those responsible (only 1 in 3 want to see prosecution.) Hell, even 46% of self-identified liberals and 46% of registered Democrats believe the CIA actions were justified.
Not going to happen. Obama doesn’t want to go after who did it, Holder doesn’t want to investigate those behind it, the CIA certainly won’t stand for it, the GOP will never allow it, and most of all, the American public could not care less about prosecuting torture. Hell, we think it’s great because you never know when you’re going to have to take a Black & Decker to the temple of some dirty foreign brown guy to save American lives from a digital countdown clock, just like the teevee machine shows us over and over again.
We don’t want to know, and we don’t care to know, and we never will. All Team Cheney has to say is “If your family was facing a terrorist bomb, and you had the guy who could stop the clock tied to a chair, how far would you go to save your loved ones?” Every time we look into his world of darkness we’ve seen only ourselves.
So eventually we’ll stop looking altogether.
Lee
Actually I am 100% onboard with the ACLU’s idea of the President pardoning by name every person in the last administration responsible for torture.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
Nietzsche
Matt
The only way we’re going to get a trial is the same way *most* countries run by lawless lunatics finally do: international sanctions. Unfortunately, the people in the best position to do this (China, Saudi Arabia, etc) are by-and-large ALSO torture states.
Zandar
@Matt: This is also very true.
wilfred
and most of all, the American public could not care less about prosecuting torture.
That should be the least important reason – when public opinion determines justice, what could go wrong?
The Times points out that the US is a signatory to the Convention Against Torture, which makes it obligatory to prosecute people who have committed it. Ignoring that makes a joke of the rule of law, doing so for political expediency is ignoble. End of.
That Guy
I’m with Wilfred. It’ll happen when we MAKE it happen. And that will be difficult, but not impossible. Because we have to; otherwise we’re morally lost.
SP
If the trial were done correctly I think the public opinion numbers would change- most people still don’t have any idea about what the report actually says.
you never know when you’re going to have to take a Black & Decker to the temple of some dirty foreign brown guy
Black & Decker makes a lot of tools and appliances, and now I’m trying to figure out what Zandar had in mind- power sander? Drill? Weed whacker? Vacuum cleaner? Jigsaw?
MazeDancer
@Lee:
Agreed that naming the offenders, citing Gerald Ford precedent of “helping the country”, and then pardoning them is a step towards reality.
But can’t happen til Mr. Obama’s last day in office.
For the same reason no investigation or trial can happen. Every moment of the media for the next 2 years will be warfare on Mr. Obama. They will trash him even more than they do now. The GOP will get non-stop media access to make up more stuff about him. The investigation, and any trial, will certainly lose the Presidential election, even if Hillary says she loudly disagrees with it and starts saying “I was always for torture”. And none of the other good moves Mr. Obama has planned for his “4th Quarter” as he calls it, saying that’s where the action is, can happen.
Snarki, child of Loki
If the USA is going to egregiously ignore its obligations under the Convention Against Torture, it should just withdraw from the treaty.
That will put the rest of the world on notice.
jannydarling
Every time I think of the Clinton impeachment and compare it to this horror, it just kills me what Republicans were willing to do. They didn’t care that 85% of the country didn’t want it. They did it in a lame duck session and didn’t mind that at all. Destruction of torture tapes? Who cares? But remember how significant it was that Betty Currie had the copy of Leaves of Grass and the hatpin! Rule of Law! What about the children? Its a disgrace.
Scott S.
Y’all elect me president, and I’ll have Cheney, Yoo, Rumsfeld, etc. confessing after no more than two weeks of waterboarding and electroshock treatments.
‘Bout time these Rethug whiners got a dose of real tyranny.
wilfred
@jannydarling:
Yes. Then push and push and push for prosecution. That’s in Obama’s hands.
Spinwheel
@wilfred: It also conveniently excuses the president’s ongoing role in being responsible for allowing this to continue.
GregB
It was Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon that helped to advance the belief among the ruling elite in America that beyond facing some humiliation they will never be held to task for criminality.
It’s the lab where the monster Dick Cheney was created.
donnah
There was a Republican opinion letter in our local newspaper this morning, loaded with all the talking points. He cast aspersions on the validity of the torture report, since there were Democratic fingerprints all over it. He said no one is certain whether totrure works (it doesn’t) or whether people were actually tortured at all. (they were). He said that American people were good and decent and he believed that the detainment and questioning of prisoners were all conducted fairly and within reasonable limits. We just did whatnwe had to for the protection of our nation.
Honestly, it was Opposite Day in his letter. And this is what the sane, non-torture side is up against. The Republicans will never see or understand what we did to those prisoners. And even if they could, they would justify it in their minds.
wilfred
One reason that there was such movement against the Vietnam War was because we saw the blood of it on tv every night, ours and theirs.Nowadays, Americans, being the precious little torture tolerating shits they are, are spared all that. No one’s ‘conscience’ is troubled by pictures of dirty little Muslims being beaten about or having a bit of water tossed on them.
Trials and evidence would make a lot of people question the war machine, no matter who’s running it.
Rasputin's Evil Twin
There is one good thing that comes from this: We can end the stupid “Are we a christian Nation?” crap. Christians by definition should be utterly opposed to torture. Therefore, we cannot possibly be considered a Christian nation. We just call ourselves one though we don’t seem to know what it means.
I propose we “prove” the CIA methods aren’t torture by waterboarding Cheney a few dozen times, stripping W and hosing him down before throwing him in a meat locker for a few days, putting Rumsfeld in a stress position with Metallica blasting in the headphones glued to his head for a week. You can add names and treatments to this list. All of this on live TV, every station, every possible Internet point, 24/7, with no escape, no excuses for the public, just so they see torture for what it is.
Mandalay
@wilfred:
Sort of, but not really. The Times should know better. If you read the fine print, our participation is entirely on our terms, and is close to meaningless:
In other words, the United States can only be guilty of torture if the United States itself decides that it is guilty of torture.
We want to be able to brag that we are a signatory to the Convention on Torture, but we don’t definitely don’t want to be held accountable.
Lavocat
Pride doth come before a fall.
And hubris is the downfall of all societies.
When ANY society thinks that the rules that apply to ALL societies no longer apply to them – because, of course, THEY are special – then get ready for all hell about to break loose.
So, the U.S. government is now above torture and murder when it comes to, well, just about anyone. Turn about is fair play, as they say. And it looks like Pandora is out of her box. My guess is that ISIS is going to be the least of the U.S. government’s problems.
Yatsuno
The fact this even MADE it into the New York Times even using the dreaded T word is remarkable in itself. The fact that this country has gotten so sick as to approve of such horrific methods shows just how badly our society has rotted.
Cermet
Truth be told – the 0.001% want to make damn sure that their ass-licking followers (read the standard 27%) support torture so it can be used here in the old US of A for those people (anyone not of or for the 0.001%) This is where the last shred of freedom died under bloody hands cheney and bush the brain dead
Davis X. Machina
The French experience in Algeria, now 50+ years ago, doesn’t suggest much in the way of hope for any sort of reckoning.
beth
@Cermet: It’s already started. Look at the reactions to the botched executions we’ve had. I can’t count how many people I know who’ve said in some form or other that the person being executed deserved to die in a slow, painful manner.
Mike in NC
@wilfred:
The rule of law in this country doesn’t apply to the 1%, which includes Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush and the rest of the authoritarian oligarchs.
JEB! should pick Jack Bauer as his running mate. They’d sail to victory in 2016.
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
@Lee:
How’d those pre-emptive pardons of the Iran-Contra criminals work out for the rest of the country? Look their names up in Wikipedia and you’ll see how many of them went on to work for Bush II. Some of them even helped him set up his torture regime.
Sorry, but “pardon everyone” is pretty much the stupidest idea ever.
wilfred
@Mike in NC:
I know that; none of them will ever see the inside of a prison cell. But that still leaves all the CIA and DOD people who did their bidding and implemented their policies. We sent some half-literate kids to the stockade for doing far less evil at abu Ghraib. Just because the most powerful go free doesn’t mean that everyone is above the law.
Besides, even a Truth Commission is better than nothing. Name names, show faces. Punish the wicked.
RaflW
I hate to say it, but who actually cares about the NYT editorial board? Not anyone who’s going to be in a position to do anything about prosecutions.
If this country ever does anything about this black stain on our history, it will be in 20 years, as in, after Voldemort is finally mort. Even then, I don’t hold great hope of the truth really being heard and accepted.
The forces of violence are arrayed and mobilized, as this weekends grotesque political use of the cop killings to push back, really really hard against #blacklivesmatter. Defending torture (excuse me, enhanced interrogation) is par for our f’d up course.
These days it is plain to see, 9/11 worked far better than Osama ever imagined. Our country has turned inward and is still pants-wettingly terrified. Stir in 400 years of racial animus against blacks/browns/others, and we’ve got an awful stew to work through.
20 years is way too optimistic on my part. Bah, humbug, on this very drear midwestern Monday.*
.
*Global climate change is ruining the one good thing about MN winters: crisp sunny days. We’ve had two weeks of gloom and damp and mixed wintery precip glop.
Mandalay
@Snarki, child of Loki:
The US has no obligations under the Convention Against Torture. There is a giant asterisk against our name, and our participation is a sham – see post #17.
You are correct that we should withdraw, but not because we are egregiously ignoring its obligations; we carefully immunized ourselves against the irritation of having any obligations in the small print. We should withdraw because our government fundamentally does not believe in what the Convention Against Torture stands for.
Frankensteinbeck
Okay, lay out for me legal process and results of prosecuting Bush and Cheney for torture, because let’s face it, prosecuting anyone else is worth jack shit the next time the president orders torture to happen. What’s the legal process? Who arrests them? What court are they tried in? Is it even legal to try a former president for his policies at all? Make sure to include how congress and the supreme court’s attitudes may factor in. Then when you have a result, talk about how this will influence the law going forward.
I run that scenario in my head, and the answer I get is ‘Don’t go there’. If you get something different, I’d really like to hear it, but I’ll need details.
@Lavocat:
Every society thinks they’re special all the time. The US has been through this before and hasn’t fallen. Societies that fall because they do something they know is immoral are vastly in the minority. Abyssinia launched their empire on being meaner than the other guy. Sparta launched theirs on telling the laws of accepted behavior everyone else followed to fuck off. Imperial Rome lasted for centuries after the formation of the Empire, and that was so shocking the book of Revelations was written as doomsaying. No society involved collapsed because Joan of Arc was politically murdered. This disgusting episode is disgusting, but it’s also a blip on the radar of history.
CONGRATULATIONS!
We’re too busy. All of us, apparently.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@GregB: I understand why Ford did it and remember at the time (I was only nine, so there was a great deal of ignorance involved) thinking that it was probably a good idea as it would just make people feel worse about the government. As a child I thought that was a bad idea.
Of course, the problem was that the people should have been feeling really fucking bad about the felonious shitbags – and make no mistake, everyone knew that Nixon and every member of his administration were criminal to the core long before Watergate – that they’d put into office and let fester there, but I didn’t understand that at the time.
It’s been just about forty years since then, and with the benefit of my laser-sharp hindsight I can see quite clearly that not putting Nixon on trial was a mistake of catastrophic proportions, one that has had repercussions to the detriment of our citizenry and body politic that will reverberate long after I’m dead.
Mnemosyne
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
And yet we now have the head of the ACLU saying we should do the exact same thing and pre-emptively pardon the torturers. Because apparently this time it will totally work out.
Larry R
It would be helpful if the editorial board HONESTLY explained why it’s changing its mind only now on this stuff, after having kissed the administration’s very dirty behind for the past ten years (including, of course, the failure to release the FISA report until after GWB’s re-election). Fucking hypocrites.
gratuitous
Well, it certainly stopped the independent prosecutor into the Whitewater “scandal” that the public greeted Kenneth Starr’s Neverending Story with a collective shrug. But he plodded on, until he found something his Republican pals in Congress could gin up the outrage machine with and the impeachment of Bill Clinton was on like Donkey Kong.
What’s the matter with appointing a special investigator with subpoena powers and getting on with this? Aren’t credible allegations of torturing people to death sufficiently concerning to people in high governmental positions? Sure, a majority of the electorate thinks torture is just okey-dokey; a similar majority of the electorate thinks we got good, actionable intelligence from torture.*
But what if an investigation began, started with public testimony from the lower level factotums who were cogs in the torture machinery? Add in the written work, bring up the destroyed tapes of torture sessions, go through session by excruciating session, and get the public’s attention focused on it for more than one segment of one news cycle. Then start bringing in the heavy hitters, the folks like John Yoo who provided the legal rationale, establish the timeline, and start drawing the prosecutorial noose tighter.
Yeah, it will take a lot of time. Yeah, it will be very inconvenient. Yeah, Fox News will yammer incessantly about politicizing policy differences (yawn). Yeah, some Democrats who knew better will get caught up in the net. Yeah, it’ll cost some money (like $81 million paid to the medical advisers to the torture regime?). And it will still be the right thing to do if we’re serious about this whole Constitution notion.
*Nobody seems to know how so many people got this erroneous impression; it apparently just simultaneously occurred to 57% of the poll’s respondents. Couldn’t be because of any 24-7 dinning by a certain corner of the popular media, because that’s would be rank green lanternism and shut up. An investigation won’t work, dammit, because shut the hell up.
Mnemosyne
@gratuitous:
IIRC, if you want a federal special prosecutor, Congress has to pass a law creating one. Starr was appointed under a Nixon-era law that Congress allowed to expire after the Whitewater fiasco.
Bohammer
Who is going to pay for this investigation and trial? A republican Congress will never vote for the funds. Remember, Republicans cut funding to close Gitmo, then complain Obama will not live up to his promise to shut it down!
MomSense
@Frankensteinbeck:
Where should we put the W Administration torture in the queue of torture, pillage, and other atrocities that should be prosecuted? People are looking back to Ford’s pardon of Nixon but how about the Trail of Tears, or reparations for all the fucking capital and wealth that slaves generated? It would be worth a fortune now for the descendants.
The thing is–torture, genocide, predatory economics have always been a part of who we are as a country. I’m not condoning it. I don’t approve of it. If I ruled the world, things would be very different but I get frustrated when people act like this is some sort of unusual event. We have a vile history. We don’t like to talk about it and we have throughout our history opted to look forward instead of prosecuting.
Avery Greynold
I hate to be cold blooded, but there is only one thing that would change our minds. If an imprisoned American was water boarded, etc, 83 times by “terrorists”, with the results videotaped and released on a weekly basis. We could secretly watch all the episodes on the internet. Sometime over the 83 weeks, everyone who is not insane would understand. At least 60, maybe 70 percent of us.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
@Frankensteinbeck:
Yup. Any Bush-Cheney trial would inevitably wind up with the Supremes. Y’know, the same folks who put them into office to begin with. Let’s see what happens when the highest court in the land twists their personal versions of the Constitution into saying ‘Its not torture when we do it.’
@MomSense:
Ooh ooh, let’s not forget slavery or the ensuing oppression of minorities after we patted ourselves on the back for liberating them.
We’re the bright shining city on the hill, one infested with angry white men of all stripes.
Chris
@wilfred:
It’s more than that, I think. The images in Vietnam shocked America because for most people (e.g. those who hadn’t served in war before), it was something genuinely new, and something completely at odds with the self-image they’d been told to have of themselves. Especially in the quarter century since World War Two, when America’s image as the beacon of democracy, liberator of the oppressed, shining icon of Truth, Justice and the American Way had been cranked up to eleven and become more ingrained than ever.
A lot’s changed since that initial Vietnam shock of watching napalmed villagers and summarily executed prisoners – not the least of them being the Reagan era Ramboization/revision in which we (or at least a huge chunk of the nation) learned to rationalize that Vietnam had been a good war tragically stabbed in the back by the people who’d been showing us these images.
Nowadays, the Fox Noise machine does the same thing in real time for every crime we commit. Yes, it’s true that images as frank and brutal as we had in Vietnam would never be shown again today. But it’s also true that on the rare occasions when these images do break through, they don’t provoke that shock effect anymore. When the Abu Ghraib photos were plastered all over the media, Rush Limbaugh’s reaction was to guffaw something to the effect that it was just frat hazing and we shouldn’t get so worked up about it – and much, maybe most of the country agreed.
Chris
@Mike in NC:
Yeah.
Pop culture’s actually a great barometer for this kind of thing. You’d never have seen someone like Jack Bauer in the television shows of fifty years ago – it just wasn’t what the public wanted to see in itself. “Mission: Impossible” did one episode dealing with American war crimes in Vietnam. It was about a communist propagandist who’d fabricated a video purporting to show evidence of them, and the IMF had to expose the fraud to the world. Moral to the public – “of course America doesn’t do these things. Only a commie propagandist would tell you otherwise.” “24” deals with the same topic by actually filming the war crimes, having the hero commit them, and making it not only meritorious but world-saving. Moral to the public – “of course America does these things. It SHOULD do these things. And YOU’RE a commie propagandist if you think otherwise.”
Calouste
@Rasputin’s Evil Twin: Maybe Christians as individuals should be by definition opposed to torture, but Christian nations have always been pretty torture-happy. Only when nations became secular and non-ideological have they mostly stopped torturing and abusing citizens.
John N
It’s just nice to know, for sure, that when history judges this era, they will be seen as inhuman monsters, like all torture regimes are. It makes me feel a little less crazy to know this fact. We the public will get our share of the blame, in the form of questions like “how could they let it happen?” But the real scorn will be reserved for those people who actually ordered and carried out the torture.
Not that any of this is new, because we’ve known about this for almost 10 years now. But it’s different to hear them actually defend the practice of torture. That’s a bridge too far. History will not judge this kindly. But at least I know that for sure, now.
Chris
@John N:
Whose version of history? “McCarthy was RIGHT” and “Vietnam was a righteous war which was only lost because Walter Cronkite was a traitor” are both the mainstream opinion among conservatives and, as far as half or so of the American public is concerned, the true version of history. That’s before you even get to Lost Cause revisionism which was the popular version of history for far too long and, among many, still is.