No matter how much some folks would like to believe otherwise, you just can’t let go of the past without first addressing it.
Our freshly out-of-office malefactor chieftains and their backers would love for their deeds to vanish into the mists, to be misremembered in text and concealed in myth until all the principals are dead. Other Americans acknowledge that evils were done and lies were told but argue that paying any attention to them will distract us in the "fierce urgency of now" and pull the country apart when unity of purpose is essential for solving our multiple crises. Move on, it is said. Forgive and forget, or at least, forget.
If we take that path, we belie ourselves. Making this choice, we condemn our children to a future in which the vicious misconduct we have witnessed is repeated in some new form and new venue by new leaders telling new lies by means of new and more sophisticated media. Moving on in such fashion, we taint the ideals our nation supposedly holds inviolable. We might as well walk into the National Archives rotunda, smash the glass display cases, take a crap on the Constitution and wipe up with the parchment of the Bill of Rights.
The publication over the weekend of Mark Danner’s US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites in The New York Review of Book has been commented on already by some observers who have been most attentive to torture during the past few years. These include Valtin/Invictus and emptywheel, and by the time what I am now writing is published, Glenn Greenwald, Armando, Andrew Sullivan, Scott Horton and others may well have weighed in.
You can read in Danner’s piece grim excerpts from the report of the International Committee on the Red Cross that he obtained. That report is based on interviews with 14 captives held by the U.S. Here is its essence:
The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
As Danner writes:
Such unflinching clarity, from the body legally charged with overseeing compliance with the Geneva Conventions—in which the terms "torture" and "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" are accorded a strictly defined legal meaning—couldn't be more significant, or indeed more welcome after years in which the President of the United States relied on the power of his office either to redefine or to obfuscate what are relatively simple words.
Indeed.
Last week, David Rose of the Daily Mail conducted an exclusive interview with another of the tortured, Binyam Mohammed. Mohammed had finally been released from Guantánamo after seven years there and in secret prisons in Pakistan and Morocco. He’s accused the British authorities of complicity in his torture. On Friday, the BBC conducted the first broadcast interview with him (starts at the 6:45 minute mark):
Binyam Mohammed: All the questions were done by the Moroccans. They would go out, talk to the Americans, then they would come back and have all their questions ready. And most of the questions which I was asked could not have come from anywhere else but British intelligence. ...
Manel: What did you think when you realized that this was coming from the UK?
Mohammed: I was shocked, ‘cause there I was in Pakistan talking to John on how he’s going to help me.
Manel: That’s the MI5 officer?
Mohammed: Yes, that’s the MI5 officer. And I find out that the way he is going to help me is by forcing the Americans to question me on things which I had no idea about.
Manel: And just to be clear, because this is important, you’ve said you don’t want to talk about what actually happened to you in Morocco, but you have been shown this information at the same time or at a different time to the things that you say were happening to you in Morocco; in other words, the torture.
Mohammed: That was happening at the same time. These photos were coming in, I would say, every maybe three weeks. The torture was going on sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly.
Manel: Are you suggesting that the (MI5) person was involved at any level in the actual torture that you say you went through in Morocco.
Mohammed: Well, to my understanding, and to my belief, if it wasn’t for the British involvement right at the beginning of the interrogations in Pakistan and the suggestions that were made by MI5s to the Americans of how to get me to respond. I don’t think I would have gone to Morocco. It was that initial help that MI5 gave the Americans that led me through the seven years of what I went through.
Manel: ...What do you want to see happen?
Mohammed: Well, I want or prefer ... I want people taking responsibility for what has happened over the seven years. If we just let people do what they want to do, and then not be accountable, that’s opening up the doors to torture and abuse.
Manel: How high should this accountability go?
Mohammed: Well, literally, I think all the way to person who started all this was the President of the U.S. I think he has to take, he has to be taken to trial for what he has done all these seven years.
Manel: And in terms of Britain’s role?
Mohammed: Well, if there is any evidence that the Prime Minister was involved or knew about this, then he should be tried, too.
In her brilliant, cut-to-the-bone book on the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, The Wordy Shipmates, Sarah Vowell quotes the most famous line of Governor John Winthrop: "We must always consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us."
She continues:
The eyes of all people are upon us. And all they see is a mash-up of naked prisoners and an American girl in fatigues standing there giving a thumbs-up. As I write this, the United States of America is still a city on a hill; and it’s still shining – because we never turn off the lights in our torture prisons. That’s how we carry out sleep deprivation.
Vowell’s book was written while the Cheney-Bush administration was still in office, of course, before Barack Obama told a joint session of Congress that "the United States of America does not torture." He could have made that section of his speech 50% better by saying the United States does not torture anymore. Because everybody knows that America did torture until at least January 19, 2009. And it would have been 100% better if he’d said his administration would seek out those who ordered torture and sought specious legal shields for their actions. But then, had he done so., perhaps not so many in Congress would have given him the same rousing applause.
Much has been made in this bicentennial year of the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln. Of particular note has been his second inaugural speech. This contains those famous words meant to heal: "With malice toward none, with charity for all, ...let us strive on to finish the work we are in, ...to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."
As in those dark days just weeks before Lincoln was gunned down, our nation today certainly needs healing. But there’s more it needs. In all the recent talk of Lincoln’s presidency, we rarely hear mention of some other words from that same speech his Annual Message to Congress dated December 1, 1862:
"Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. We, even we here, hold the power and bear the responsibility."
So it should be for every administration. Each holds the power and should bear the responsibility. But responsibility without accountability means nothing. For the Obama administration to give its predecessor a pass for its misdeeds, to move on as if nothing happened, would be a failure of responsibility. We cannot escape history. Yet that seems to be the new administration’s intent.
Not only does it appear there will be no special prosecutor and no regular prosecutor assigned from within the Department of Justice to handle these crimes, it appears there will be nothing like the Otis Pike-style investigation as in the 1970s. The odds seem against even the weakest tea, the truth and reconciliation commission that Senator Patrick Leahy has proposed. No new witnesses have been called to speak at a second round of the hearing that was held March 4, according to his press office.
Meanwhile, some who followed orders to torture are still serving their terms in the slam, while the order-givers roam free.