Have we become everything we hate?

Posted by Joel Friedlander | 1 Comment

The Justice Department is likely to conduct an investigation into whether any American personel were involved in torturing terrorism suspects.  The government, however, will not prosecute any individuals who adhered to the guidelines of the lawyers in the Justice Department regarding torture.  Moreover, the Justice Department will not prosecute the lawyers who rendered those legal opinions.  The investigation, apparently, will investigate whether anyone violated the guidelines of the Bush Administration that were in place at the time. (See:
John H. Cushman, Jr.,  “The Attorney General May Open Interrogation Investigation.”

From the middle of the 1930’s onward, the Judicial System and the Laws of Nazi Germany allowed the government to place people in Concentration Camps, where they were worked to death, starved to death, tortured to death, experimented upon until death, or just plain murdered upon arrival.  At the end of the War, the victorious Allied Forces prosecuted the monstrous offenders in Nazi Germany, and also in Japan, for crimes against humanity.  We knew how to identify crimes against humanity when another people committed them, but we can’t seem to recognize them when we are the offending party.

Doesn’t the apparent unwillingness of the Justice Department to prosecute anyone who operated under apparent color of law to violate the obvious norms and standards of civilized behavior strike you as a wee bit WRONG? I had hoped that I would never hear an American excuse criminal, unconscionable, Unconstitutional behavior, by saying, “I was just following orders, or in this case, I was just acting according to the Law.  Such actions make a mockery of English/American Law from Magna Carta onwards.

Notice, if you will, that I did not use the word “inhuman.”  The reason for that is torture is oh so very human.  Humans have a long history of torturing others, whether it be to get information, for punishment for real or imagined crimes (heresy!), or just for amusement (visit the Roman Coliseum for example!).  The thing is that we didn’t eliminate torture because we didn’t enjoy it, we eliminated it because we felt that we had evolved beyond our basest instincts.

If we don’t punish the people who justified these crimes, and the people who ordered them to be done, and who carried them out, we will no longer be Americans!  We will be as base and primitive as the worst torturer in the Spanish Inquisition pouring hot lead into the rectums of suspected heretics.  We will have become the NAZIs of the 21st Century!

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