Correcting America's Dark Chapter of Torture

There's a bomb of a contradiction at the
heart of what's passing for a debate on the torture regime of the past
eight years. President Barack Obama calls those years of secret prisons
and "enhanced interrogation techniques" a "dark and painful chapter in
our history." That's not just a suggestion of something amiss. It's an
admission and an indictment of wrongs, in terms that have been applied
to atrocities like war crimes and slavery. The secret Bush
administration memos Obama released -- the black book of those years,
translating Soviet torture methods into "corrective" and "coercive
techniques" like sleep deprivation, simulated drowning, beatings,
starvation, hanging from hooks -- prove the point.

Little of it
is new information. Obama is merely documenting what's been coming to
light in newspaper reports, books and a graphic Red Cross report for
the past several years. And he's not doing it of his own initiative. We
have the American Civil Liberties Union to thank for forcing his hand.
Still, he's removed all doubts about what Jane Mayer, in "The Dark
Side" (Doubleday, 2008) summed up: "The Bush administration invoked the
fear flowing from the attacks on September 11 to institute a policy of
deliberate cruelty that would have been unthinkable on September 10.
President (George W.) Bush, Vice President (Dick) Cheney and a small
handful of trusted advisers sought and obtained dubious legal opinions
enabling them to circumvent American laws and traditions. In the name
of protecting national security, the executive branch sanctioned
coerced confessions, extrajudicial detention, and other violations of
individuals' liberties that had been prohibited since the country's
founding."

"Dark and painful chapter" isn't an exaggeration. Nor
would be a truth commission, a tribunal, punishment for the
perpetrators -- not as retribution, but as correction. And not to
appease the rest of the world or even rehabilitate America's image in
the world's eyes. World opinion doesn't define who we are. American
principles do, for our sake. Yet the response to that dark and painful
chapter is turning into its own crime.

Sen. Patrick Leahy's
"commission of inquiry" would stop at an inquiry and grant all
participants immunity. Obama wants to look forward, not back, because
"nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame
for the past." But justice is all about squaring proper blame with past
and proven crimes. Otherwise, might as well release the 2.4 million
people in American prisons and jails, most of whose crimes were
victimless, non-violent or less heinous than torturers'.

CIA
Director Leon E. Panetta opposed so much as the release of the memos,
claiming it set a dangerous precedent for the disclosure of
intelligence sources and methods. But sources of intelligence aren't
being revealed. Methods of torture are. Keeping them secret would only
safeguard them for use in the future. And to date, not a single name of
actual torturers ("interrogators," as the preferred euphemism goes) has
been released. Only the names of a posse of Bush administration
staffers and lawyers tasked with finagling legality out of indefensible
practices have: David Addington, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Steven Bradbury.

There's
a disturbing parallel between the way the posse and al-Qaida went about
justifying their mutually indefensible deeds. The Quran specifically
forbids the killing of women and children. It declares in one of the
Quran's most humanistic passages that "anyone who murders one innocent
person shall be treated as if he murdered all of humanity." No Muslim
cleric worth his turban would have sanctioned 9/11, designed
exclusively to murder innocent people by way of suicide bombing. So
Osama bin Laden shopped around for a rationale. He found it in the
twisted sophistry of branding suicide bombers as martyrs, and innocents
as infidels. Then he got himself an obscure cleric to sign off on the
rationale. He had his secret memos, too.

Should interrogators and
the lawyers of a rogue administration be punished? They were just
following orders. That, anyway, is the Nuremberg defense -- despicable
then, despicable today. In Israel, the country most justifiably
outraged by the Nuremberg defense, soldiers may disobey orders they
personally consider illegal or unconscionable. Some lawyers and
interrogators, we now know, heroically did just that during the Bush
regime, and paid the price. Others didn't. Following orders is no
defense. Nor is "moving on."

But if there's a bomb of a
contradiction at the heart of this debate, there's also an elephant:
George W. Bush. His name is hardly mentioned in all these stories of
shame and torture. It's all about the lawyers, the process, the
exigencies of the moment. But it isn't. The decisions were his. "I am
the decider," as he put it. And so he was. This "dark and painful
chapter" began with him. His orders for secret memos. His orders to
torture. It should end with him.