Torture and responsibility

Obama has said that CIA interrogators will not be prosecuted for using Department of Justice approved techniques as revealed in the just-released memos. That reasoning seems to accept the idea you shouldn't be held responsible for doing what top government lawyers told you is legal and proper, even if later on that was proven to be illegal and morally wrong.

On most things I agree with Obama. And this is certainly a gray area. If it's clearly wrong, like sending innocent civilians to the gas chamber, they should certainly be prosecuted and held responsible as individuals for doing something that is clearly murder.

If it is something where two experts might disagree about what constitutes torture, as in the case of these memos, then I would agree with Obama's decision.

However, I do not agree that it should be dropped there. I think there should be a full investigation upward into how these decisions came to be made and who was responsible for the pressure on the DoJ to come up with these memos.

A note in today's NYTimes says:

"The first use of waterboarding and other rough treatment against a prisoner from Al Qaeda was ordered by senior Central Intelligence Agency officials despite the belief of interrogators that the prisoner had already told them all he knew."

In my opinion, this is exactly the tactic that Cheney and Rumsfeld used: continually insisting and badgering the CIA into coming up with what they wanted to find (WMD, for example), implying that they weren't doing their job or were incompetent until they produced what they wanted to hear. That's how we wound us with bad intelligence; they didn't allow intelligence analysts to use their judgment about reliability of data but insisted on having the raw data themselves. And then they could cherry pick what suited their agenda.

I'd like to see the emails or phone conversations (probably in the great heap of deleted ones) where CIA is saying the guy has told us all he can and Cheney is insisting that they rev up the torture until he "breaks" and tells them what he's holding back. What if the interrogators are right and he has nothing more to tell? Then they torture him, he makes up stuff to get them to stop, and then we go on wild goose chases, make claims that aren't true, and throw innocent people into Gitmo.

I think it is admirable that Obama wants to move forward and not get bogged down in the blame game, which will only increase the partisan divide. He thinks it will hamper getting his big agendas through Congress.

But I think it is vital that crimes done in our name be exposed and responsibility identified. I'm less interested in sending people to jail and more interested in getting the truth on record.

Let's have investigations where it looks like crimes were committed; and for the gray areas and for identifying those responsible up the chain of command -- all the way to the White House -- I think the Truth and Reconciliation type commission is the way to go.

Chris Dodd, who has proposed it, still has the best phrase about that: "We shouldn't turn the page until we have read the page."

Ralph