This morning’s edition of The New York Times contains one of the most scathing editorials that have ever appeared on the pages of that august newspaper. The Old Grey Lady offered a resounding endorsement to calls for a full-fledged criminal investigation of the Central Intelligence Agency’s torture of suspected terrorists.
Earlier today, the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch delivered a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder calling for the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the CIA’s interrogation program. The Times echoed this demand, saying that an investigation is more than warranted in light of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s recently-released report on the program. The Times weighed the inevitable suggestion that an investigation would be contrary to President Obama’s earlier call to “look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” Its reply?
“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.”
In other words–as painful as an investigation of this program may be, it is necessary to restore our nation’s honor.
The Senate report includes graphic details of detainees being waterboarded, subjected to “rectal feeding,” deprived of sleep, beaten, and even threatened with execution. The Times’ editorial board sums it up in the bluntest possible terms.
“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.”
Moreover, CIA lawyers were well aware that these methods violated both federal and international law. They relied on what The Times calls the “legal pretzel logic” of memos from the Office of Legal Counsel to justify them–a reliance that, as The Times points out, “was not made in good faith.”
The Times believes that at a minimum, the investigation should focus on any agents who took part in torture, as well as the psychologists who devised the torture regimen. It specifically demands that Jose Rodriguez, a CIA official who ordered the destruction of several videotapes of torture sessions, face further investigation. Rodriguez was the target of a Justice Department investigation in 2012, but no charges were filed. The Times also calls for the investigation to look into the roles of former vice president Dick Cheney, his chief of staff, David Addington, former CIA director George Tenet, and Justice Department lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee. To those who suggest an investigation would be payback, The Times says that such an investigation’s true purpose should be to ensure this never happens again.
I’d add something else. Allowing this to go unpunished would erode one of the most sacred principles of our justice system–that those who are suspected of crimes still have rights that must be respected, even if the suspcets were manifestly guilty. Contrary to what some defenders of this program may have you believe (Bryan Fischer immediately comes to mind), even if these detainees did commit acts of terror, they did not forfeit their rights to basic human dignity–rights that we are required to honor under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
What if we were talking about police waterboarding suspects in a criminal trial in this country? There’s no question about it–we would be demanding serious prison time for any cops who engaged in such conduct. We should demand no less in this case. Allowing this to go unpunished would effectively be saying that it is acceptable to punish one act of barbarism with another.
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Darrell Lucus, also known as Christian Dem in NC on Daily Kos, is a radical-lefty Jesus-lover who has been blogging for change for a decade. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook.
