Eugene Robinson: We Need to Know What Was Done in Our Name

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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090824_we_need_to_know_what_was_done_in_our_name/

We Need to Know What Was Done in Our Name

Posted on Aug 24, 2009


One of the less graphic Abu Ghraib prison photos shows a detainee in a stress position, one of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” pushed by the Bush administration.

By Eugene Robinson


History’s demands can seem inconvenient, unfair or unreasonable. But they can’t be ignored. The Obama administration has a legal and moral duty to determine whether crimes were committed in the Bush-era detention and interrogation of “war on terror” prisoners—and, if so, to prosecute those responsible.

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Given Obama’s ambitious domestic agenda, he could hardly be eager to have to spend time and political capital in pursuing transgressions that took place years ago on another administration’s watch. Inconveniently, however, torture and cruel treatment are clearly against the law. Holder is said to have been appalled upon reading the classified version of a voluminous report on CIA abuses. If there is credible evidence that crimes were indeed committed, I don’t see how the nation’s chief law enforcement officer—or its commander in chief—could just look the other way.

There are those who argue that such prosecutions would destroy the CIA’s morale. But giving interrogators and jailers a “just following orders” free pass is unfair to those in the chain of command who knew these alleged practices were wrong and tried to prevent or halt them. Waterboarding, to cite perhaps the most flagrant abuse, has been prosecuted by the U.S. government as a war crime. This history cannot have been unknown to all CIA employees and contractors.

If Holder’s reported decision to reopen the CIA cases does lead to prosecutions, there is one possible outcome that everyone should find unacceptable: that only the hands-on abusers are charged and tried. Proper investigations must work their way up the chain. In some instances, it may be a midlevel employee who overstepped clear boundaries and ordered subordinates to perform acts resembling those done in medieval dungeons. In other cases, illegal acts apparently were approved at the highest levels. Investigators need to be allowed to follow the evidence all the way to the top—into the White House, if that is where the trail leads.

I’m under no illusion that George W. Bush or Dick Cheney is actually going to be prosecuted by the Justice Department. But I want to know—and I believe the nation needs to know—the full, unvarnished truth of what they and others did in our name. It’s probable that painful scrutiny and lasting disgrace will be the only sanctions that Bush and Cheney ever face. But history demands at least that much.

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