13 Responses to “Do we need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in America?”

1. Ben
   April 21st, 2009 @

   I think we need to prosecute them. We’re supposedly a nation of laws, and yet these guys get to violate the law and walk away, why precisely? Because they were powerful? Because we’re afraid to look into that abyss of our permissiveness so long as we’re left with the illusion of security? That’s what the Bush crowd were selling – “Turn away, don’t look at what we’re doing, just rest assured that it’s in your name and for your protection.” In our name. Don’t we have a sense of national honor that needs avenging anymore?

2. Eric
   April 21st, 2009 @

   Agree with Ben. If they violated the law, then they should be prosecuted in U.S. courts.

3. Ben
   April 22nd, 2009 @

   And, barring the inability or unwillingness of US courts to prosecute them, I have no problem with them going to the Hague. Super-national law is not just for the little guy or the defeated parties in a war. It’s for the big fish too. It’s how we make sure everyone plays by the same rules.

   South Africa’s experience is not exactly parallel. That was a wholly domestic matter, bound up in decades of social change. America could maybe use some Truth and Reconciliation around, say, the civil rights movement and the leftist terrorism of the 60s and 70s, but these are clear, distinct, conspiratorial criminal acts. There’s no broad social movement towards torture that needs explaining or reconciling. Other defendants don’t get to stand up in court and say, “Your honor, my acts may be reprehensible, but I think it’s more important to get to the bottom of what happened than to punish me.”

4. Eric
   April 22nd, 2009 @

   Of course, any probe into torture shouldn’t be limited to the president, vice president, attorney general, secretary of defense and their respective cabinets and dominions. We as a nation should also look into who in Congress was aware of the alleged torture, when they aware of it and what Congress may have done to allow said torture to continue.

   Harry Reid, as a member of United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, no doubt was briefed at a very high level about the extraction techniques being used on prisoners of war (or enemy combantants, or whatever we are supposed to call them now).

   For the uninformed, the Senate Select Committe on Intelligence has “exclusive oversight of the CIA, as well as concurrent jurisdiction with respect to the intelligence activities of other elements of the Intelligence Community…agencies within the Intelligence Community were expected to keep the [committee] ‘fully and currently informed’ of their activities, including any ’significant anticipated activities.’”

   https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/agency-and-the-hill/05-The%20Agency%20and%20the%20Hill_PartI-Chapter2.pdf

   It is highly unlikely, actually impossible, that members of this committee do not know EXACTLY what techniques are being used to extract information from detainees.

   So the question is begged. If the United States CIA was torturing detainees, why did this committee not order those activites stopped immediately? And if members of this committee knowingly allowed the torture to continue, should they be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law?

   My answer to the latter question is yes.

   And just so we understand who we are dealing with here, other members of the committee we should subponea for questioning include:

   John McCain
   Olympia Snowe
   Orrin Hatch
   Mitch McConnell
   Dianne Feinstein
   Jay Rockfeller
   Russ Feingold

   Those are just present members (and not even all present members). Going back to past membership, we’d bring subponeas to:

   Bob Graham
   Richard Shelby

   And all other members of the committe since 2001.

5. Joel Friedlander
   April 22nd, 2009 @

   There is a long tradition of Congressional non interference with foreign spying in this country. The Congress generally, and the Foreign Affairs Committee specifically, turns a blind eye to whatever the CIA is doing around the World. It was such behavior that brought us what happened in Iran with the placing of the Shah in power, and in Chile with the overthrow of Salvatore Allende. Those are just two of the programs that were allowed to go without oversight by the Congress. There of course was the big ta do over the Contras in Nicaragua as well. If Congress had done what it needed to do our foreign policy history would be far different. For so long the Congress has thought that the CIA actually knew what was going on but the haven’t, either in Europe or the Middle East. We have allowed a bunch of jerks to mess up the World under the banner of protecting America.

6. Eric
   April 23rd, 2009 @

   You’re right. Congress may or may not have known what was happening in Gitmo. But I think plausible deniability will only take one so far, and I want to know exactly who knew what, and when they knew it. Subponea them, put them under oath, make them testify. All of them. Justice department, cabinet members, Congress, CIA, Gitmo prison guards.

   If you continue to disagree with me, please read yesterday’s NYT article on this very issue:

   http://tinyurl.com/cfgvts

   “No one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.”

   Further down the story:

   “This account is based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former senior officials of the C.I.A., White House, Justice Department and Congress. Nearly all, citing the possibility of future investigations, shared their recollections of the internal discussions of a classified program only on condition of anonymity.”

   And for those of you that can’t click through all three pages, here’s the money shot:

   “There was one more check on intelligence programs, one designed in the 1970s to make sure independent observers kept an eye on spy agencies: Congress. The Senate and House Intelligence Committees had been created in the mid-1970s to prevent any repeat of the C.I.A. abuses unearthed by the Senate’s Church Committee.

   As was common with the most secret programs, the C.I.A. chose not to brief the entire committees about the interrogation methods but only the so-called Gang of Four — the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate and House committees. The rest of the committee members would be fully briefed only in 2006.

   The 2002 Gang of Four briefings left a hodgepodge of contradictory recollections that, to some Congressional staff members, reveal a dysfunctional oversight system. Without full staff support, few lawmakers are equipped to make difficult legal and policy judgments about secret programs, critics say.

   Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, who in 2002 was the ranking Democrat on the House committee, has said in public statements that she recalls being briefed on the methods, including waterboarding. She insists, however, that the lawmakers were told only that the C.I.A. believed the methods were legal — not that they were going to be used.

   By contrast, the ranking Republican on the House committee at the time, Porter J. Goss of Florida, who later served as C.I.A. director, recalls a clear message that the methods would be used.

   ‘We were briefed, and we certainly understood what C.I.A. was doing,’ Mr. Goss said in an interview. ‘Not only was there no objection, there was actually concern about whether the agency was doing enough.’”

   Allow me to retype what Gross said:

   We were briefed, and we certainly understood what C.I.A. was doing

   So yep, Congress knew. Repubs and Dems. They knew. And they were reckless. And they should all be made to answer for their crimes.

7. Joel Friedlander
   April 23rd, 2009 @

   If Nancy Pelosi thought that waterboarding was legal then she is an ignorant piece of shit who doesn’t belong on the board of the local library.

   Anyone with even a rudimentary education at college knows that waterboarding was used during the Spanish Inquisition to compel confessions by alleged heretics.

   She is obviously a miserable political hack who is in a position far beyond her moral, ethical, and intellectual level. Everyone who was involved should be removed from office; they knew and they did nothing.

   Get rid of them all, Democrat and Republican.

8. Eric
   April 23rd, 2009 @

   My favorite part is that not only that Pelosi thought the methods were legal but that they were not going to be used.

   Really?! The CIA comes to the Capitol to give a briefing to you and three other people about some interogation techiques that they didn’t intend to use. That was your take-way Madam Speaker? Either you’re dumb as a sack full of hammers (as Joel contends) or you are a liar (my position).

   Either way, I agree with Joel. Toss them all out. I’m going to paraphrase a William Buckley saying: I’d rather be led by the first 100 names in the Boston phonebook than the current crop of politicans we’ve got. And by current crop I’m going back from 2002 onward.

   I think the shit is appropriately hitting the fan on this one. Good.

9. Jason Ihle
   April 23rd, 2009 @

   Sadly I don’t believe anyone will be held accountable. I think Obama is very hesitant to become the first President to order a criminal investigation into the goings on of the previous administration.

   The Spanish courts were on the brink of holding their own investigation, but decided not to go ahead with it because of various legal complications.

   Andrew Sullivan has been an incredibly outspoken advocate for a number of years, but especially these last weeks, of holding everyone accountable. If you’re interested in keeping up with what pundits and editorial pages are saying and what new information is being released and what the Obama administration is doing, give a daily read of his blog at http://www.andrewsullivan.com

   What continues to strike me as baffling is the sheer number of people who are trying to brush this off like it’s no big deal or Peggy Noonan, who insists that “life should be mysterious” and we should “keep walking” forward. Yeah, try that one next time you get pulled over for speeding:

   “Do you know how fast you were going?”
   “You know officer, life should be mysterious. Let’s not dwell in the past. Keep walking to the future.”

   That ought to go over well.

   And how the hell are so many conservative pundits defending these memos? These are the same people who would be up in arms if any American soldier underwent these “enhanced interrogation” techniques in another country.

   It’s simply dizzying to listen to people defend these techniques by singling out the most benign. If I have to listen to one more idiot talk about how being kept in a confined space with a caterpillar is not torture while ignoring things like waterboarding (enhanced interrogation favored by the Khmer Rouge, by the way), stress positions and sleep deprivation my head might explode.

   If I hear one more disingenuous fucktard talk about how we did everything to make sure these people were kept safe (“But they had a special strap around his neck to prevent whiplash when they slammed him against the wall. And it wasn’t a real wall, but a flexi-wall”), I might rip my hair out by the roots.

   Jose Padilla, an American citizen captured in the United States, was turned into an empty shell of a man after the torture he endured. In the end, the indictments brought against him aren’t even the crimes he was originally arrested for!

   The same people who insist that the calls for investigations and indictments are partisan bickering are the same people who called for the impeachment of Clinton because he committed perjury. Ten years ago it was about the rule of law. Now it’s about looking forward.

   I think the only way to restore credibility to our country is for some very important people to end up behind bars at the end of all this.

10. Eric
    April 23rd, 2009 @

    What baffles me about the defense of the interrogation is the demonstration of how inadequate our intelligence programs were circa 2001 & 2002. Do you mean to tell us that the only way we could determine terrorist plans was through torture? This would lead me to believe that we had no other mechanisms in place to monitor terrorist movements, chatter, training, recruitment, etc.

    Why were we so unprepared? It’s not as though we lacked advanced warning. WTC bombing in ‘93, embassay bombings in ‘98, USS Cole in ‘00. There was plenty of warning that perhaps we should stopping listening to Russian radio broadcasts and shift our attention.

    Torture should have never been part of the plan. We should have been more prepared. Our leaders failed us. And through torture they have shamed us.

11. Eric
    April 23rd, 2009 @

    The other questions I have, but am illequipped to answer, deal with the international prosecution of these claims. Why haven’t these crimes been prosecuted through The Hauge? Or is this more a matter of time question? And if we ring up Cheney and Gonzalez on violations of the Geneva Convention, what procedures are in place to enforce that ruling?

12. Joel Friedlander
    April 23rd, 2009 @

    The reason why the Europeans move so slowly on these things is that they are justifiably afraid that if they make too much noise about what other people do the World will start looking at their activities, and they are afraid of what they will see.
    As to Cheney, I am so sorry that the man is not well, because if he was convicted and sent to prison he wouldn’t survive. He is the kind of person I would like to see serve a nice long sentence if he was convicted of violating the Geneva Convention and other treaties about war crimes.

    His entire diatribe on FOX TV was that the end justifies the means. Boy is that a horrible way to think about torture. His kind of person cheered when we rounded up American Citizens of Japanese origins and put them in Camps during WWII.

    He and the people on Fox (Generally, not always) represent the very worst that America has to offer.

    As to the question of enforcement of convictions by the International Court of Justice, it reminds me of Stalin’s remark about Papal Censure, “How many divisions has the Pope?” I don’t think that there is any way that they can enforce a conviction unless the defendant is there and can be confined. In this situation I hardly expect that they will be able to extradite a former president, vice president, attorney general, etc. But, the mere conviction would go a long way towards preventing anything like this from happening again.

13. Jason Ihle
    April 24th, 2009 @

    Also, so many people ignore the most important element of torture: it doesn’t fucking work!!

    People will tell you whatever you want to hear just to make the unbearable pain/discomfort/fear stop.

    And Eric makes a very good point. Why did these methods suddenly become the best way to gather intelligence?

    Another claim I’ve heard a lot from the torture apologists is that it worked. The argument goes something like this: “All you libruls keep shouting about torture, torture, torture. Torture is wrong and Bush and Cheney should go to prison. But you’re ignoring a very important part of the conversation – it worked! There hasn’t been a terrorist attack in America since 9/11.”

    Except there also wasn’t a foreigner-perpetrated terrorist attack in America for the 8 years before 9/11 and that was accomplished without torture.

    It’s a real straw man argument because all the evidence of how al-Quaeda works is that they wait and wait and wait with tremendous patience and strike when they are ready. 9/11 didn’t suddenly signal that there would be a rash of terrorist attacks on America. It was one in a series which included the first WTC bombing, the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the USS Cole. They gave us everything they had to offer at that moment. And now they’ll wait until they can one-up themselves and they’ll do it again. Torture isn’t going to prevent that. Intelligence gathering from people on the ground and listening to chatter, yes. Also altering the face of the Middle East from a breeding ground for terrorism to a stable region full of democratic values. Unfortunately we completely botched our best chance at making that happen.

    But I digress.

    Someone above mentioned Fox News. Look, I don’t know how anyone can take Fox News seriously. It’s like a three-ring circus most of the time. But Shepherd Smith has been a constant voice of reason over there and you can see a great video clip of his going nuts about torture: “This is America!! WE DO NOT FUCKING TORTURE!!!” he shouts. As the pundit next to him goes on talking, obviously Smith’s producer talks to him through his earpiece and tell him what he said because after a moment he just says, “Oops.”

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