Incomplete Thoughts on the Torture Debate

I have been holding off my comments on Leahy's Truth Commission and the Obama Administration's conclusions on Gitmo until the dust settles. Barbara Ehrenreich writes today about her being accomplice in torture for penning the piece on making the H-Bomb that got Mr. Mohammad renditioned and tortured. Senator Whitehouse (D-RI) claims what we will be finding out about torture under the Bush Administration is "quite big" and "horrendous".

The Justice Department will be filing terrorism charges in a civilian court of Qatari national Ali Saleh Khlah Al-Marri--the only detainee taken prisoner in the U.S. and still being held in this country at the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C. The ACLU is still pushing to have the Supreme Court hear his case, which is a challenge to the President's authority to detain an individual inside the United States without habeas corpus and keep that person in indefinite military detention.

Human rights groups and civil libertarians have been pushing the Obama Administration hard to make good its promises to return to constitutional rule. The problem I see is that the remedies are not as clear as human rights activists make it seem. After 9/11, the Bush Administration issued a number of executive orders, some still secret, that in effect created a law-free zone concerning detainees in Gitmo,black sites, Bagram and terrorist suspects.

The military lawyers were purposely kept clear of these policy formulations, the Geneva Accords were suspended,(and quite wrongfully interpreted) and the federal criminal code was ignored. In this situation, it is not an easy task to 'walk back the dog" since alot of that path was obliterated by evidence obtained under torture. So, what do you do with detainees that from a prima facie case are dangerous hombres and others who are completely innocent and who have been detined incommunicado for years? I don't think the issue is as simple as we would like to pretend.

Can one really argue, for example, the case as the Bush Administration did that these people can be detained forever? That also seemed to be the tentative position of the Obama Administration. What do you do with them all those years? It's like we create our own official "disappearance" policy like a Latin American dictatorship.

Conservative bloggers are claiming that Bush has been vindicated by Obama's lack of movement on these issues. Here,I do think it's important after nearly eight years to air out the issues in the public and prosecute select persons, particularly the lawyers who concocted a dangerous legal rationale for the Bush policies. It is also important that the American people learn how compliant were the Republican and Democratic leadership in Congress on these issues. It's one thing for Nancy Pelosi to urge prosecution but what is her responsibility, having been fully briefed on these polcies and actions?

For those like Dick Cheney who claim these policies prevented several further terrorist attempts against the United States, it is time for them to put up or shut up. This can be arranged so that "national secrets" are protected. Of the four plots I know of that these apologists name, one was fictitious according to British counter-intelligence, and the three were uncovered by either NYPD or the FBI and were not revealed through waterboarding detainees at Gitmo. So if there are others, these folks should come forward.

There is the argument that we need some new way of prosecuting terrorists. We already have the goofy Military Commissions Act of 2006, which was really meant to legitimize already existing executive orders. We should remember that over 158 terrorists, including a few tried this week, have been convicted in our federal courts and sentenced to federal prisons. So far none of them have escaped or been released to return to the battlefield compared to the release of Gitmo detainees, who went on to restock Al Qaeda in Yemen. For all the torture apologists, they coveniently forget the Millenial Bomber was apprehended by the FBI while en route from Vancouver to L.A.and he spilled his guts and gave up the details of the 9/11 plot without being tortured. Somehow the FBI did something right.

The debate is likely to heat up and get muddier as the weeks go on.