The process used to justify water boarding at secret prisons is far larger than just the issue of torture. Republican cheating over the years has encouraged and empowered repetitive lawbreaking, with the Bush Administration’s secret prisons and torture being the latest in a string of abuses. When elected officials are deemed above the law, our faith in government wanes, and our trust in Obama’s Change meme falters. I expect that President Obama will do what’s right if people demand that his Administration and Congress attend to this properly, not just sweep it under the rug.
The "rule of law" is meaningless if we ignore it whenever we're too busy dealing with the economy or trying to "move forward," as the Obama administration put it. The plummeting economy isn’t the only way to attain Third World status, we take a step that direction each time we fall prey to dishonesty from the Oval Office. Allowing government officials to operate above the law destroys our credibility and our good standing in the world. These events are too notorious to be accepted as "just the way things are now." Water boarding was an interrogation technique that the Japanese military used and were prosecuted for. Torture is a crime that the U.S. and other nations prosecuted at Nuremberg years ago, and continue to prosecute in contemporary cases such as in Serbia. Reasons for not prosecuting now are the same as the excuses offered at those trials. The excuses didn't fly then and they shouldn’t be acceptable now.
I remember how I felt when President Ford pardoned Richard Nixon in 1974 after he was caught breaking the law. I was so disgusted I quit voting for years. What was the point of participating when criminals at the highest level of government would be let off? President Obama says we should move forward and we shouldn’t be vindictive, but that’s really not the point. We don’t even know the extent of who was involved in the lawbreaking this time. Holding officials accountable isn’t vindictiveness, it’s a way to ensure that this never happens again! The little we already know requires prosecution. At the very least, we must know the full truth to prevent it from recurring.
When we excuse high level lawbreakers in the interests of "moving forward instead of looking back," we embolden them to commit more and more crimes.
Nixon’s Watergate lawbreaking wasn’t the first, nor the last, of Republican cheating. In 1980, President Carter was ahead in the polls but lost his reelection bid because Ronald Reagan’s team conspired to negotiate a deal with Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini to derail Carter’s lead in the presidential race. The bastards actually used our tax money to give Iran military weapons as a bribe to NOT release the American hostages. The hostages were expected to be released two weeks before the presidential election, and instead, they were held until the day Reagan was inaugurated, as if he somehow won their freedom. In reality, he risked their lives by delaying their release in order to trick the electorate into voting Republican. The meme was that Carter couldn’t win their release, so we needed a "tough guy" president instead. These unethical activities and our inability to prosecute just degrade our democracy and make a laughingstock of American justice and the rule of law. Now we have a wildly popular Democratic president suggesting we do the same thing – let bygones be bygones. But you cannot move forward without dealing with the past. In fact, there needs to be a serious reckoning before any sense of reconciliation can be achieved, especially since the characters corrupting our government are repeat offenders.
Let’s look at a little history. From Wiki - Cheney's political career began in 1969, as an intern for Congressman William A. Steiger during the Richard Nixon Administration. He then joined the staff of Donald Rumsfeld, who was then Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity from 1969-70. He held several positions in the years that followed, including White House Staff Assistant in 1971, Assistant Director of the Cost of Living Council from 1971-73, and Deputy Assistant to the president from 1974-1975. It was in this position that Cheney suggested in a memo to Rumsfeld that the Ford White House should use the Justice Department in a variety of legally questionable ways to exact retribution for an article published by The New York Times investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. Would the Bush Administration have acted more responsibly if the Nixon administration had been held to task for breaking the law? Absolutely.
After getting away with Watergate, Iran Contra, drugs for arms, election fraud and other abuses, it should come as no surprise that more heinous crimes such as torture were then authorized using secret memos. The name of the game is getting away with it, and Republicans are experts. These memos describe grotesque war crimes legalized by those who benefit from destroying our great nation. Take a look at the Bybee memo just released. It's not written to his boss but to a guy in the CIA who's apparently in charge of deciding whether to torture Abu Zubayda. The incessant CYA clarifications ("You have said...," "You assert...," "You have reported that...") appear to be setting the CIA employee up to be solely responsible in case the actions are investigated. The memo itself doesn't read like a purely advisory legal opinion. It seems like a legal authorization and preemptive point-by-point legalistic excuse for why the laws against torture don't apply to what they want to do to Zubayda. In fact, it reads like somebody told him (presumably Cheney or Addington) to go figure out a legal defense for why what they want to do to Zubayda isn't actually, strictly speaking, really torture.
So how do we fix this mess? To begin, we need complete information. The Truth Commission should investigate, and a special prosecutor should be assigned to give the investigation some teeth. Their report should include recommended policy changes. We start with indictments, then move quickly to trials, convictions, and punishment. The underlings could have quit in protest, like Richard Nixon's AG did in the Watergate scandal's infamous "Saturday Night Massacre" back in October 1973. They didn't; instead, they wrote the memos like dutiful little soldiers. Actions like that should have consequences. Indict them, and some of them will turn tail and rat out the bosses rather than fall on their swords.
In the end, President Obama should immunize the little fish, those who were ordered to commit the torture, the staff who assisted in drafting the legal memos, and the aides who were present when the idea was discussed with and approved by the POTUS, VP, Secretary of Defense, the CIA Director, and the National Security Advisor. Obama could grant clemency and commute their sentences providing they admit wrongdoing and testify against those in power who ordered them to do what they did. Otherwise we’ll never get to the truth, the power structure that has hamstrung our democracy for the past fifty years. Worse, the only lesson rabidly angry Republicans will draw is that their dirty work should be done completely within the context of a prior declaration of martial law.
The rule of law must be upheld or we are doomed to repeat these dangerous totalitarianism abuses done by our government in our name. Obama should step up to the plate on this, not sweep it under the Oval Office rug. But in reality, the decision of whether to prosecute is not Obama's to make. Eric Holder and a special prosecutor need to be held responsible for follow through. The Obama administration should initiate criminal proceedings, but the citizenry has the main responsibility in preventing abuses in the future. These acts were carried out by our government, in our name, and if we are as repulsed by them as we claim to be, and as proud of our country as we should be, then the burden is on us to demand that something be done. If we don’t we are complicit in the crimes of our government and we will have failed as in our duties as Americans.