After a recent Senate Intelligence Committee report detailed how the CIA tortured al-Qaeda prisoners, former Vice President Dick Cheney has occupied national airwaves with defense of the tactics used. Cheney’s claimed:
?It worked; it absolutely worked. I’d do it again in a second.?
The investigative report says otherwise, however. Tactics such as sleep deprivation and waterboarding produced no information or cooperation from the detainees. Moreover, they’re illegal and inhumane. And one of the U.S.’s largest media is calling for quick justice.
In a blistering Dec. 21 editorial, the New York Times not only criticizes Cheney, but President Obama, as well, arguing that the incumbent needs to take the recent Senate report even further.
?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. [?] 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.?
Shortly after taking office in 2009, Obama banned waterboarding and other inhumane methods of interrogation. That doesn’t make up for the previous use of torture, though, NYT argues, calling for investigation and prosecution:
?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.??
Many doubt that the president would pursue such charges or investigation, however, citing his ?look forward instead of backwards? statements he’s made since first assuming the presidency in 2009.
The International Criminal Court has hinted that it may take action on U.S. torture occurring in ?its countries of membership.
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