Over the last few days it has been established that the United States government systematically created a comprehensive torture program replete with legal backing from lawyers at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. This information leaves the current administration in an awkward spot. In torturing prisoners, domestic and international laws were broken, international treaty obligations were contravened. To allow these crimes, some of which are possible war crimes, to go unpunished is to introduce what Andrew Sullivan calls a “cancer” into the democracy, eroding it and hastening it demise more than any barbarian invasion could. The evidence of wrongdoing is so overwhelming, it would be mockery to let it go unreproved. But it is becoming increasingly clear that this contagion has already sufficiently corrupted at least two branches of the American government. Apparently, senior congressional leaders were “informed” of these “enhanced interrogation techniques”. It appears that then National Security Advisor, Condeleeza Rice, signed off on these techniques. It appears that whatever dissenting opinion arising from within the government was squashed and destroyed.
Prosecuting these crimes will definitely be portrayed by Republicans as a “witch hunt”. The Obama administration will be accused of vindictiveness and introducing a “precedent” in American history where a new administration pursues the outgoing administration in a version of “victor’s justice”. But not pursuing some form of justice is out of the question.
No other nation so identifies itself with the preservation and promotion of human rights than the United States. As I have noted elsewhere, unlike nation-states founded on kinship, the United States was founded on ideals. It has always prided itself as a “city upon the hill”. At its core, this episode threatens the very ideals that give this country its identity. It is now impossible to “move on”, to forget this dark passage and behave as if nothing happened. This period looms over the American experience – an existential threat to its core identity.
Beyond the domestic and existential implications of these activities is the implicit threat it poses to the international ethos we (all God’s children) have pursued since 1948. The adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights have progressively nudged a global convergence of values. It has orchestrated a confluence on the limits of the power of the state, its obligations to its citizens and their rights vis-a-vis the state. What had initially been Western philosophical ideals spread and were embraced in many parts of the world. There has been no greater state champion of this ethic than the United States. For pro-democracy and human rights activists, imprisoned and tortured anywhere, there was always the assurance that the United States would speak out in their behalf. Should the United States itself now give in and become a torture state, whence their respite?
The efficacy argument does not stand, nor does the argument that the threat was so great that torture in its prevention is justified. That the United States is now reduced to justifying torture because it worked is abhorrent. Both of these arguments are objectionable and repulsive. Dictatorial and autocratic regimes have justified arbitrary arrests, torture and extra-judicial killings with these same arguments. When they did, the United States always (and rightly) rejected those arguments. They cannot and will not stand in this case.
I don’t envy the Obama administration, but being president of the United States is not an easy job and this is the life he chose.
