Who Brings Government to Justice When It Does Wrong Such as Torture?

When the federal government commits a serious wrong, there are no customary institutions outside of government that bring government officials to the bar of justice. Americans rely on divided government to do the job of policing itself. They rely on hearings, public pressures, and sometimes impeachment or threats thereof to examine cases of malfeasance and provide a public exorcism that removes the stains of wrongdoing. But these work very slowly and usually not at all. The result of letting injustices and wrongdoing go unnoticed or not faced up to squarely is a weakening of the moral character of the people and their government. This doesn’t happen overnight but through a long process of deterioration.

Torture is a case in point. The Senate has released a report but it’s almost 2015 and the abuses date back to 2002. Evidence has been destroyed intentionally by the CIA. So far, no one has been held responsible. This would require placing many high officials in past and present administrations in the docket. And torture charges are only the beginning of the war crimes with which some of these officials could be charged.

Let’s review a wee bit of the history of the use of torture that began under Bush from about 2002 onwards.

On November 5, 2001, the New York Times published an article titled “Torture Seeps Into Discussion by News Media”. Voices discussing torture included Jonathan Alter of Newsweek, Fox’s Shepard Smith, CNN’s Tucker Carlson, and Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick. Some voices were openly favorable to torture. Critics began to be heard early on too and especially over the next several years as Bush moved toward abrogating prisoners’ rights and employing torture.

On March 9, 2003, in another Times article “THREATS AND RESPONSES: INTERROGATIONS; Questioning Terror Suspects in a Dark and Surreal World”, U.S. officials denied using “physical torture”. However, the body of this article detailed such practices that were being employed in CIA dark sites as sleep deprivation, light deprivation, withholding of food, water, access to sunlight and medical attention, denial of painkillers for wounded prisoners, black hoods for hours on end, forcing prisoners into kneeling or standing positions in extreme cold or heat and isolation.

We read also “Intelligence officials also acknowledged that some suspects had been turned over to security services in countries known to employ torture. There have also been isolated, if persistent, reports of beatings in some American-operated centers. American military officials in Afghanistan are investigating the deaths of two prisoners at Bagram in December.”

The same article quoted CIA director George Tenet saying that interrogations had produced important information. The recent Senate report suggests that this was false. Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld are quoted in the article’s words as saying “that American techniques adhere to international accords that ban the use of torture and that ‘all appropriate measures’ are employed in interrogations.” This too was completely false.

In 2005, torture was a known practice and issue. (See, for example, here.) By then it was openly discussed in the press.

Nothing was done about it. Nothing yet has been done about torture to rule it out of bounds institutionally. That is discussed further here.

The people in this country have a series of clouds hanging over their heads. Failure to face up to the use of torture and to deal with the officials who put it into practice is one of these clouds. If this were being done or had been done properly in the past, the nation would have understood why torture is wrong and have rejected it firmly. It would have hopefully seen repentant witnesses and proponents change their tune or else be marginalized. We would not have the spectacle of defenders of torture again making themselves heard nationwide.

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1:00 pm on December 15, 2014