Zygoteville

revisiting the torture question

Mark Danner had a horrific article in today's NY Times detailing the torture experienced by detainees in the C.I.A.'s secret prisons abroad. How will the Obama administration respond? As information increasingly comes to light of torture committed with the explicit approval of senior Bush administration, will it force the hand of Attorney General Eric Holder, who already stated during his confirmation hearings in the Senate that waterboarding is torture, and later added that "no one is above the law"?

Perhaps. But at least for now, ranking members of the Bush administration -- including Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice -- who demonstrated a profound lack of a moral imperative by authorizing treatment that any civilian would identify as torture, are simply sauntering back to their pre-2001 lives with their confidence and self-assuredness intact. Thus, in a recent interview in the Stanford Report, Rice acknowledges that "It's perfectly legitimate to be critical of what's been a complicated and sometimes controversial and always consequential last eight years," but goes on to say: "The only thing I ask is that people be respectful of listening to the views and what we faced and how we went about it."

Respectful? How can you respect a National Security Adviser who knowingly authorized torture and in doing so profoundly jeopardized the security of American soldiers abroad and damaged the international credibility and reputation of the country as a whole? Why does she deserve our respect when she betrayed (helpfully, another article in today's NY Times reminded us where in Hell Dante placed betrayers) our most sacred trust and helped to leave our country the weakest and most insecure that it has been in decades? She and Cheney and the others do not deserve our respect. Nor do they deserve our inaction. The question is, will we act to bring them to justice? When? How?

I would argue that if we do not confront head-on the Bush administration's flagrant disregard of the law and of common human decency, our inaction will in the end wreak far graver consequences than our current economic crisis. At the same time, I fear the likely reality is that we as a country are too busy bailing out our banks, auto industries, and 401ks to do anything about it. By the time the Bush torturers are back in our sights, it may already be too late to bring them to justice. But maybe by then it won't matter anyway, because by that point there won't be anything left of the America that once was, or might have been, to be worth trying to save at all.