US and torture

The long silence on this blog is due almost entirely to feeling the need to write about the recent revelations on the U.S. torture program and not knowing how to do it.

As a recap, the Obama administration released four Justice Department memos authorizing the use of various torture techniques on U.S. held captives in Guantanamo Bay. The existence of the memos has been known for some time (the release was in response to a lawsuit), but the Bush administration refused to release them.

The memos are extremely difficult to read, mostly because of how clinical and detached the tone is in describing the techniques. I have given up trying to write about them, but Frank Rich of the New York Times has a good summation.

Since the release a few things have become clear. One is that there were people who opposed these actions, including an FBI interrogator who was able to get actionable intelligence from Khalid Sheik Mohammed in the first hour of a traditional interrogation. It has also become clear with the leak of a number of Justice Department e-mails that the "ticking time bomb" justification for these acts of torture is false.

Marcy Wheeler has a comprehensive torture timeline and Rachel Maddow has good summation as well.

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In a nutshell, the White House instituted a program of torture to try and find justifications for the war in Iraq and then tried to create the legal cover after the fact. There has been no credible evidence of any other reason for violating US and international law.

And now we are left with the question of what to do next. President Obama is taking no leadership on next steps and seems to be hoping it will go away. I get why. The Clinton impeachment hearings practically shut down all business in Washington. Those hearings would pale in comparison to torture hearings, and right now there are a enormous number of problems that need solutions quickly. But this gets to the core of the American system and it is not something where we can simply say it will never happen again. Without consequences for these actions, it will happen again, it is just a matter of when. Again, here is Frank Rich on transparency.

Plus, in addition to the torture, there are still prisoners missing. They are in U.S. custody somewhere, but we do not know where. It is deeply unlikely that they have had formal charges brought against them, access to lawyers or any type of court. This is what dictatorships do. In fact, this is what North Korea is doing right now. The only difference between North Korea detaining these journalists and the U.S. detaining the missing prisoners is that North Korea actually put on a sham trial and has announced an end date to their prison sentence.

And when the U.S. and North Korea can be seriously compared in the same breath, it is well past time to change our policies.