"We" Let Them Do It

From Jacob Weisberg at Newsweek:

The use of torture on suspected terrorists after 9/11 has already earned a place in American history's hall of shame, alongside the Alien and Sedition Acts, Japanese internment during WWII and the excesses of the McCarthy era. Even liberal societies seem to experience these authoritarian spasms from time to time. It is the aftermath of such episodes—what happens when a country comes to its senses—that reveals the most about a nation's character.
....

Well before the nation reelected George W. Bush in 2004, the country's best investigative reporters had unearthed the salient aspects of his torture policy: in December 2002, Dana Priest and Barton Gellman revealed on the front page of The Washington Post that American interrogators were employing "stress and duress" techniques as well as shipping prisoners to places like Egypt, where even fewer rules applied. "Each of the current national security officials interviewed for this article defended the use of violence against captives as just and necessary," the reporters wrote. "They expressed confidence that the American public would back their view."

Seymour Hersh broke the Abu Ghraib story in The New Yorker in April 2004. In May of that year, The New York Times revealed that the CIA had waterboarded Mohammed. In June, another major Washington Post scoop described a Justice Department memo asserting that CIA interrogators couldn't be prosecuted for using torture on detainees. That same month, NEWSWEEK further revealed that Cheney's lawyers had declared waterboarding a legal and acceptable practice. The leaked Red Cross report and the new memos released by the Obama administration add horrible detail to the story. They do not fundamentally change what we previously knew.

So yes. "We" gave tacit approval to torture when we reelected George Bush. Maybe not you, maybe not me, but "we", as a society, gave the George Bush maladministration the approval to continue to use torture.

Members of Congress say they didn't know. How could they not know? I knew. They were briefed. Perhaps certain information was withheld, but they could have read the newspapers.

The fact is that many in the country believed that torture was justified. I hear folks say the same thing today. Avoiding even the mention of the repugnance, immorality, and illegality of torture, I ask them about the innocent who were rounded up willy-nilly and tortured first and released later, the response is, "Too bad for them. We had to do it to stop the terrorists." Then I say, "But they were not terrorists. They were innocent and subsequently released!" that changes nothing in their thinking. It had to be done.

As the good book says , Pogo's book, I mean, "We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us".

Many of my friends may disagree with me, but I believe that Weisberg is right.

President Obama has done the most important thing: reversing Bush's policy and declaring, as he did last week, that torture was unequivocally wrong. What we need now is a public airing through congressional hearings and perhaps an independent commission, an idea that the White House is resisting. Pursuing criminal charges would be too hard politically and too easy morally. Prosecuting Bush and his men won't absolve the rest of us for what we let them do.
(My emphasis)

The White House must stop resisting the idea. I want the commission, but I don't want public discussion of torture shut down. That's why I do not want a special prosecutor, because important actors in the planning and execution of this horrifying policy of torture, the insiders in the second and third tier, have tales to tell, which however self-serving they may be, could shed light on what took place behind closed doors.

UPDATE: Read Diana Butler Bass' report on a pew Research poll on the attitudes of Christians concerning torture and weep.

H/T to the Episcopal Cafè.