The Worst Intensity: OPR Report On Torture

My biggest disappointment with Obama over the last thirteen months has been his failure to prosecute the war crimes that he seemed so determined to redress during his campaign. Dick Cheney now feels immune to brag about his support of torture during and after his tenure as VP and the lawyers that twisted the legal system to give cover to those crimes have now been tapped gently on the wrist for exercising nothing more than poor judgment. The precedent is set and there's nothing to stop a future administration from doing the same and even going further.

It's decisions like the OPR Report On Torture Memos that have fueled the backlash against Washington from both left and right and caused much of Obama's current strife. The lawyers and politicians get off, while grunts like Lynndie England get the blame. As Andrew Sullivan writes:

"That Lynndie England went to jail for doing things that John Yoo made legal, and Yoo does not even face disbarment, tells you all you need to know about the current state of justice in America. In the end, the current president and attorney-general have assented to this massive injustice. The responsibility is theirs'."

But even more appalling is the realization that the US suffered so much more under Bush than I previously thought. His administration's dark legacy continues to influence policy and the center has shifted so far to the right that injustices like those war crimes are now debated as legitimate tools to be employed. Failure to do so now brings hoots of "coward," while Obama appears to lack the courage of his convictions. It's that old Yeats poem, "The Second Coming" all over again:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Here is George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley discussing the loss of "one of the core principles of Nuremberg" with Keith Olbermann:

Torture & Truth: Cheney's Ongoing Role

The New York Review of Books has an excellent essay by Mark Danner, author of Torture and Truth, about the Red Cross and their role in US torture. Danner argues four things now need to be done:

First, that these policies, violating as they do domestic and international law, must be changed — which, as noted, President Obama began to accomplish on his first full day in office. Second, that they should be explicitly repudiated — a more complicated political process, which has, perhaps, begun, but only begun. Third, that those who ordered, designed, and applied them must be brought before the public in some societally sanctioned proceeding, made to explain what they did and how, and suffer some appropriate consequence.

And fourth, and crucially, that some judgment must be made, based on the most credible of information compiled and analyzed and weighed by the most credible of bodies, about what these policies actually accomplished: how they advanced the interests of the country, if indeed they did advance them, and how they hurt them.

If this last point isn't pursued then the use of torture becomes a political football - Obama's rejection of it simply being a policy, not a law. If and when a republican administration takes over in the future, torture, or these "alternative set of procedures," will likely be implemented again.

While the US dithers, it's nice to know the international community isn't just waiting around.

Jane Mayer's piece in The New Yorker, "The Bush Six," reports that a British law professor - Philippe Sands, author of Torture Team - and the same Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzón, who pursued Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, are on the case.

Here's a recent interview with Mark Danner from the Rachel Maddow show: