By Ben Wright
One of my most distinct memories of the days after the Sept. 11 attacks is former President Bush in the ruins of the World Trade Center, arm slung around a firefighter, yelling into a megaphone.
“I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon,” he said, and the nation’s heart swelled with pride and very soon the bombs began dropping.
I can only wonder if Khalid Shaikh Mohammed heard us during the 183 waterboardings we administered during his interrogations over the past few years, or if another al-Qaida official heard our cries during his 83 waterboardings or if our voices were heard in the tiny box filled with insects that other detainees were forced into.
Torture is wrong. The Geneva Conventions, while a philosophically insane attempt to apply rules to war, has been agreed upon by 194 countries, including the United States. The fact that we are not in an “official” war, as proclaimed by Congress is no excuse for mistreating prisoners that we have captured. If we are fighting this nebulous enemy that exists on the fringes of democracy, ready to destroy our ordered society, it is contingent upon us to obey some rules.
As a country, we take for granted that we are the best, that we are better than the enemy, that we are the greatest military in the world and we must act accordingly.
If we treat our detainees in the exact same way that they would treat us, where does the line between terrorist and enemy of terrorism end?
Former Vice President Cheney (a great phrase to type) has been all over the media since leaving office defending the actions of the CIA and military, saying that the information we received through torturing detainees led to the prevention of terrorist attacks.
Cheney, naturally, had no proof as he delivered his usual gloom-and-doom prognoses. He cited classified CIA memos that supposedly can justify the inhumane treatment of our captives.
Any of the information we receive while interrogating people who are being tortured and thinking they are moments from death cannot be said to be reliable at all.
But then again, if we weren’t sure about the information Shaikh Muhammed gave us the 175th time we tortured him, we always could just waterboard him again, just to be sure.
I hear a lot of arguments about how America was acting out of a blind rage against these terrorists. We all were angry about being attacked, about the deaths of thousands of civilians by these terrorists. However, no amount of individual anger can justify the mistreatment and torture of detainees that we have arrested without allowing them any of the freedoms we are trying desperately to bomb into these countries.
America has, for the most part, moved on from the “is waterboarding torture?” argument. It is, and we have been torturing detainees since 2002.
President Obama recently stated that, “We should be looking forward and not backwards,” and, along with releasing the CIA memos that detailed the torture processes, stated that officials and personnel would not be prosecuted for authorizing or carrying out the torture.
I agree with the president on this issue. As much as I would love to see Bush administration officials go to prison for their war crimes, lies and murders, it is not the time or place to prosecute them.
Unfortunately, it might never be. To prosecute a former administration for crimes committed while they were in charge sets a dangerous precedent for the future. Although there is proof that the law was broken, we cannot (especially now) be trying to clean up the disaster of the past eight years.
The whole prosecution could easily turn into a witch hunt of administration officials who then would find a scapegoat, the same thing that happened in the Abu Ghraib abuse trial and the Scooter Libby fiasco.
In both, even though officials allegedly had knowledge or even authorized the abuse and leak, respectively, none of those officials were put on trial or even investigated. I fear the exact same thing would happen in a similar media circus.
On the other hand, as an international organization I fully support a United Nations investigation into the abuse and any repercussions that come with breaking the Geneva Conventions that we signed and agreed to. Additionally, now is the perfect time to officially criminalize torture so we can be assured that this never happens again.
It’s too late to prosecute Bush officials ex post facto. However the international community should feel free to police the U.S. as we have taken it upon ourselves to police them for the past eight years. As members of these international organizations committed to assuring the atrocities of the past never happen again, we need to be held responsible.
The fact that there is even a debate as to whether any wrongdoing was committed is ridiculous and shows that just about any moral issue can be made a political one by pundits.
The U.S. undeniably broke international law in torturing detainees and the torturers need to know they broke the law and that there are consequences to breaking those laws. We may be past the worst mistakes of Iraq but the officials who authorized this wrongdoing have yet to pay for it.
