Prosecute Torturers and
Their Bosses
NYTimes Editorial Board DEC.
21, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/22/opinion/prosecute-torturers-and-their-bosses.html?ref=opinion&_r=1
Since the day
President Obama took office, he has failed to bring to justice anyone
responsible for the torture of terrorism suspects — an official government
program conceived and carried out in the years after the attacks of Sept. 11,
2001.
He did allow
his Justice Department to investigate the C.I.A.'s destruction of videotapes of
torture sessions and those who may have gone beyond the torture techniques
authorized by President George W. Bush. But the investigation did not lead to
any charges being filed, or even any accounting of why they were not filed.
Mr. Obama has said multiple
times that “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” as though
the two were incompatible. They are not. The nation cannot move forward in any
meaningful way without coming to terms, legally and morally, with the abhorrent
acts that were authorized, given a false patina of legality, and committed by
American men and women from the highest levels of government on down.
Americans have
known about many of these acts for years, but the 524-page executive summary of
the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report erases any lingering doubt
about their depravity and illegality: In addition to new revelations of
sadistic tactics like “rectal feeding,”
scores of detainees were waterboarded, hung by their wrists, confined in
coffins, sleep-deprived, threatened with death or brutally beaten. In November
2002, one detainee who was chained to a concrete floor died of “suspected
hypothermia.”
These are,
simply, crimes. They are prohibited by federal
law, which defines torture as the intentional infliction
of “severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” They are also banned by
the Convention Against Torture, the international treaty that the
United States ratified in 1994 and that requires prosecution of any acts of
torture.
So it is no
wonder that today’s blinkered apologists are desperate to call these acts anything but
torture, which they clearly were. As the report reveals, these claims fail for
a simple reason: C.I.A. officials admitted at the time that what they
intended to do was illegal.
In July 2002,
C.I.A. lawyers told the Justice Department that the agency needed to use “more
aggressive methods” of interrogation that would “otherwise be prohibited by the
torture statute.” They asked the department to promise not to prosecute those
who used these methods. When the department refused, they shopped around for
the answer they wanted. They got it from the ideologically driven lawyers in
the Office of Legal Counsel, who wrote memos fabricating a legal foundation for
the methods. Government officials now rely on the memos as proof that they
sought and received legal clearance for their actions. But the report changes
the game: We now know that this reliance was not made in good faith.
No amount of
legal pretzel logic can justify the behavior detailed in the report. Indeed, it
is impossible to read it and conclude that no one can be held accountable. At
the very least, Mr. Obama needs to authorize a full and independent criminal
investigation.
The American
Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch are to give Attorney General Eric
Holder Jr. a letter Monday calling for appointment of a special prosecutor to
investigate what appears increasingly to be “a vast criminal conspiracy, under
color of law, to commit torture and other serious crimes.”
The question
everyone will want answered, of course, is: Who should be held accountable?
That will depend on what an investigation finds, and as hard as it is to
imagine Mr. Obama having the political courage to order a new investigation, it
is harder to imagine a criminal probe of the actions of a former president.
But any
credible investigation should include former Vice President Dick Cheney; Mr.
Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington; the former C.I.A. director George
Tenet; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers who
drafted what became known as the torture memos.
There are many more names that could be considered, including Jose Rodriguez
Jr., the C.I.A. official who ordered the
destruction of the videotapes; the psychologists who devised the torture regimen; and the
C.I.A. employees who carried out that regimen.
One would
expect Republicans who have gone hoarse braying about Mr. Obama’s executive
overreach to be the first to demand accountability, but with one notable exception, Senator John McCain, they have either fallen silent or actively defended the indefensible.
They cannot even point to any results:
Contrary to repeated claims by the C.I.A., the report concluded that “at no
time” did any of these techniques yield intelligence that averted a terror
attack. And at least 26 detainees were later determined to have been “wrongfully held.”
Starting a
criminal investigation is not about payback; it is about ensuring that this
never happens again and regaining the moral credibility to rebuke torture by
other governments. Because of the Senate’s report, we now know the distance
officials in the executive branch went to rationalize, and conceal, the crimes
they wanted to commit. The question is whether the nation will stand by and
allow the perpetrators of torture to have perpetual immunity for their actions.
