We’re finally having the national debate about torture. It’s not for the faint of heart.
If we don’t get the torture issue right, then the rest doesn’t much matter. That’s been my take since Dick Cheney told the late Tim Russert that the events of 9/11/01 would make it necessary for American to walk on “the dark side.”
I know that may strike some as single-minded and perhaps heartless given the economy, the wars, the ominous H1N1 virus. But the question of whether we would condone and commit torture is a clear window on the national soul. It’s not an issue that separates humans from wild animals, it’s an issue that defines
humanity and forms the boundary between good and evil.
Because I think actions speak louder than words, I’ve long been put off by the claim of American exceptionalism, the idea that by national birthright America is inherently morally superior and those who would dispute this are to be contained, embargoed, or napalmed. Putting the hubris aside, if we’re so blessedly exceptional then why would we resort to using the methods of our most despised enemies? Doesn’t torture refute the whole notion of American exceptionalism? And, yet, the lead apologists for Cheney’s trip to the dark side are also the loudest of the exceptionalists. To which I say, for heaven’s sake pick a chair. You can’t have it both ways. If there is anything, at all, to American exceptionalism it begins with a commitment to be a nation of laws, not of men, of human rights, not tyranny. What Bush and Cheney engaged in was tyranny.
Since President Obama and his chief of staff, Rahm Emaneul, tried to explain a couple weeks ago how they were going to split the baby on torture by disclosing the Bush Justice Department’s torture memos but ruling out prosecutions, my conscience has been smoldering. The issue is like Haley’s comet. I can’t take my eyes off it. I can understand why Obama wants change without the pain, but I’m convinced he’s misguided, that this issue is not something we ought to “just keep walking” by, as President Reagan’s speechwriter, Peggy Noonan, so blithely recommended recently. The Bush torture memos and what they led to are a dark and fiendishly sticky tar on our walking shoes and all our clothes. It’s not something you can just dust off your sleeve without breaking stride. (As I was in the midst of brooding about all this, my best friend from grade school sent me this short video and it reminds me why we need artists, and friends, to help us along at times like this.)
I work at a law firm. The law’s clear that torture is a punishable crime. After World War II, the U.S. helped convene and participate in a tribunal in which Japanese soldiers were tried and executed for waterboarding. And yet, America is now all jelly-kneed by the political consequences of prosecuting Bush Administration officials and, concurrently, it seems the legal community decided to take this moment to go out for a very long lunch. Even Obama knows that the best way to trip up onrushing liberals is to throw a guilt trip in their paths and he did this, effectively, on April 16th by saying that “this is a time for reflection, not retribution.” I’m waiting for the New Yorker cartoon with the lowly burglar or serial killer seeking leniency by quoting Obama’s line to a smirking trial court judge.
There are notable exceptions. Jonathan Turley has been eloquent, as has former Reagan Justice Department official Bruce Fein.
But it’s New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, who best locates the issue and concisely lays out the right course for “Reclaiming America’s Soul”:
“We are, or at least used to be, a nation of moral ideals,” he wrote Sunday a week ago. “In the past, our government has sometimes done an imperfect job of upholding those ideals. But never before have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for. ‘This government does not torture people,’ declared former President Bush, but it did and all the world knows it. And the only way we can regain our moral compass, not just for the sake of our position in the world, but for the sake of our own national conscience, is to investigate how that happened and, if necessary, prosecute those responsible.”
Krugman does a better job than I would do of rebutting all the objections to seeing this through, including dispelling the notion that, with so many other challenges confronting us, it’s just impossible to think about an accounting that could lead to prosecutions. Krugman points out that we just need the Justice Department to do its job, and this hardly will distract others from their respective efforts to save the auto industry, the banks, deal with global warming, or to help us stop epidemics.
The most surprising thing to me has been the lack of outrage from religious leaders, particularly those on the religious right who have regularly trashed secularists for abandoning moral absolutes. A few days ago my cousin (who gathers, sorts, and broadcasts all sorts of useful information from her post in Washington D.C.) sent me a CNN item with the headline: “Churchgoers more likely to back torture, survey finds.”
The article refers to a survey of 742 Americans last month by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press that was analyzed by the Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life. The survey found that 49% of Americans believe that torture against suspected terrorists can “often” or “sometimes” be justified, with another 22% believing it can “rarely” be justified. Among churchgoers, though, the numbers believing torture can be justified is slightly higher (54%), and is highest among the white evangelical Protestants that were so much a part of the base that put and kept George W. Bush in the White House.
I went to Sunday school when I was a kid. I remember being taught about a furious Jesus evicting the moneychangers from the Temple, but I don’t recall a passage, or a parable, that would have Jesus condoning waterboarding or inflicting severe physical or psychological pain on another human being. The Jesus in my Bible would surely have intervened to stop the torture and to use the dehumanization, anger, and fear of the torturers (including the memo writers on up to Cheney and Bush) to enlighten them toward salvation.
So, I’m genuinely baffled. Where would this other Jesus, the waterboarding savior, have come from? Maybe my Sunday school curriculum was missing a gospel. Perhaps it’s in one of those still-classified memos that former Vice President Cheney is pestering Obama to release, to prove that torture works.
–Tim Connor
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