Greetings!
Every apologist for the Bush/Cheney Torture Report starts with “Let’s go back to the fearful days after 9-11…” The implication is “wouldn’t you do the same thing”? OK, let’s play their game… let’s go back to when Americans were dying and justly terrified. George W sits behind his desk agonizing over treatment of enemy prisoners, reaches for his pen, and writes “Treat them with humanity, and let them have no reason to complain.” George Washington responded with humanity and integrity, laying a foundation that served us over 200 years. Our George W defiled that legacy and we’ll live with the fallout for 200 years to come.
The Revolution wasn’t the last time America pondered torture. Lincoln, deciding the fate of Rebel prisoners, concluded: “Military necessity does not admit of cruelty, that is, the infliction of suffering for the sake of revenge, nor of maiming or wounding except in fight, nor of torture to extort confessions.” His General Order 100 confirmed this ideal and later influenced the Geneva conventions. We didn’t stoop to torture in WWI, we executed and imprisoned Japanese soldiers who waterboarded in WWII, and we extended Geneva protections to prisoners in Vietnam. As late as 2006, military field manuals forbade torture including waterboarding, hooding, forced nakedness, and beatings.
Personalities matter. People of ethics and morals can stand against pressure from the sadistic, but people without that spine can’t. Washington’s and Lincoln’s consciences prevailed over the easy path of torture, but the vacuous George W. Bush said “We had lawyers who said it was legal, so we did it.”
Those involved with the torture cabal need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law; that would be the only way to regain our moral authority. However, I can’t rationally expect the criminals behind these atrocities to ever be prosecuted anymore. Obama wants to “move on”, there’s no appetite for a trial in Congress, and the International Criminal Court is impotent. A meaningless ‘censure’ of the Bush regime would be an insult to justice, but America CANNOT LET THIS STAND. Is there ANY way left to claw back our national character? Maybe. And, ironically, it’s Bush’s own idea.
The ACLU recently suggested the Bush/Cheney cabal should be pardoned. The idea was first floated by Conservatives terrified the incoming Obama administration would actually enforce the law. While that hope lived pardons made no sense, but now it may be America’s last option to repudiate the Bush administration’s crimes. Like Ford’s pardon of Nixon, it would confirm crimes did indeed take place without the “long national nightmare” of a trial. It would spare CIA agents who tortured and abused on the orders of their president, and reiterate the values that real Americans have held all along. A pardon wouldn’t be justice, but we’ve learned not to expect justice anymore. Maybe it’s the best we have left to hope for in today’s political climate.
Take Care and Make a Great Day!
