So here's the riddle:
A rock climber and his beagle are at their favorite climbing site. The cliff is a mile long, sixty feet high at the center, and tapers off to level at each side. The climber starts his ascent on a 5.9 route. The beagle runs a half mile to her left, rounds the taper, and soon appears above the climber, who is about a third of the way up and planning a way to tackle a 20 foot diagonal crack.
The question: who's going up the best possible way? Oh, and what does this have to do with Watergate and torture?
Well, duh. It's a trick question, because it assumes that the only point is to get to the top. If you're the beagle, the fastest way is the best way (and it's jolly good fun to bark at your master, go back down, bark at the bottom, and go back up and wait). If you're the climber, the climb is the reason to get to the top, so the climb is the best possible way.
Many of us are beagles. We can see the end result, be it the cliff top or, say, prosecution of former Executive Branch officials for their actions. But if the point is the climb -- if the reason we're doing this is to get it right, so to the last nth of our ability we can say this won't happen again -- then we need the slow slog, the hard way.
The other day I wrote a somewhat pedantic diary on this topic (more or less); here, I want to illustrate my point differently.
Take a look at a Watergate timeline. Despite all the (deserved) credit heaped on Woodward and Bernstein, the three events that ultimately brought down the President were, in order: James McCord's letter to Judge Sirica; John Dean's decision to cooperate with Watergate prosecutors; and Alexander Butterfield's disclosure to the Senate Watergate Committee of the existence of tapes. Those who argue for prosecution as soon as possible might see justification in this timeline; after all, McCord wrote his letter only after he was convicted of breaking in at Watergate. Here's the rub, though: there was no guarantee that McCord would do so, and plenty of reasons why he might not. Similarly, Dean's cooperation was no given, and who would have guessed in advance that Nixon would have the rope for his hanging -- and that anyone at the White House would tell investigators about the tapes?
The bottom line is that three men at critical junctures in the timeline found enough honor to tell what they knew. To bring me back to my analogy, that's when we found the handholds in the rock face. We cannot assume that similar persons with honor will step forward this time. Indeed, Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation has already shown that this group of scoundrels knows how to obfuscate.
Well, you say, let's be the beagle, and simply go for it. Let's start the prosecution process on the big guns. The beagle, though, simply assumes there's an easier way around. Maybe it takes hundreds of miles to find the taper. Maybe, by rushing the process, we end up instead turning a felon into a hero, a la Ollie North.
What I see as necessary at this point, then, is to build support for investigations. That support needs to come from three places: Congress; the public; and the CIA. Are you surprised by the last one? You shouldn't be. You could argue that these memos did a great disservice to the CIA. By giving agents license to torture, an environment was created that would leave an agent open to question if he didn't use the approved techniques. What seems like an easy, moral question to me may well have looked like a knife's edge to an interrogator. Do you think the CIA has any interest in disassociating itself from this past? I'm pretty sure Leon Panetta does. It strikes me that the Administration has been at pains over the last week to bring the CIA around to an investigation. And the best reason to secure the CIA's cooperation? Possibly aside from the NSA, the CIA is the best possible place to look for the proof. Surely some there had misgivings; certainly anyone with misgivings would CYA.
What I see is a laborious climb to the top. Maybe this is a 5.12 or 5.13 -- I don't know -- but if we're assembling all the necessary gear, and we bring the right expertise to bear, we might nail the bastards who did this to our country. In the meantime, I have to go. There's something barking at me up there.