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January 5, 2009
One of the issues the US needs to come terms with is its use of torture in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11. Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, the CIA's secret "black sites, the policy of rendering and the Geneva Conventions not applying to the conflict with al-Qaeda signify the decent into torture.
In this review in the New York Review of Books David Cole says that Philippe Sands in Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values paints the following picture:
Through his interviews, he tells a story about how ordinary human beings, all working within an institution designed to fight by the rules, felt tremendous pressure to bend the rules—and in most cases did so without apparent concern or self-doubt. A narrowly pragmatic ethos guided virtually all actors. The real arguments were for the most part not about whether coercive tactics were legally or morally acceptable, but about whether they worked. But with the courageous exception of Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora, few argued that coercive tactics were wrong because they were immoral and illegal, whether or not they worked.
A reckoning is due since complicity in the torture policy reaches the very top of the Bush administration. The United States has never taken full responsibility for the crimes its high-level officials committed and authorized. However, there will be no prosecution since Congress, in the Military Commissions Act, granted retrospective immunity to officials involved in the interrogation of al-Qaeda suspects in the wake of September 11.
Cole cals for an independent bipartisan, blue-ribbon commission to investigate and assess responsibility for the United States' adoption of coercive interrogation policies. Will this happen?
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Torture is seen by Scott Horton (in Harper's Magazine, 2008-12 "Justice after Bush: Prosecuting an outlaw administration, which I highly recommend) as the issue that best defines the criminality of Bush and Co, although Horton certainly covers other illegalities and assaults on the justice system.