America's quick recovery from its torture program suggests it wasn't a torture program in the first place
Having all-but granted immunity to those who actually carried out the torture because they believed they were merely following legal advice, and with the widespread understanding among experts that it's nearly impossible to criminally prosecute lawyers who were merely offering legal advice, the Catch-22 of nonaccountability is almost complete.
But is President Obama right that America has survived its injuries, having had a while to sleep it off? Can we simply put behind us the obscene picture of violence and cruelty painted by the new OLC memos and the 43-page report by the International Committee of the Red Cross publicized last month by Mark Danner? Was the decision to brutalize our prisoners some form of temporary insanity that is, as Obama's Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair put it yesterday, justifiable if looked at within the "context of these past events" and the "horror of 9/11"? Are we OK about government lawyers and medical personnel and the highest-level government officials collaborating to legalize and implement water-boarding next time the "context" and the "horrors" lead us to lose our collective minds?
What we have learned from the new memos and the ICRC report dwarfs the hoodings and humiliations that took place at Abu Ghraib. Yet when we learned of the prisoner abuse there in 2004, it wasn't just vengeful, lefty, America-hating crackpots who were horrified. We all were. What happened in the intervening five years to make feeling sick to your stomach a partisan issue?
President Obama makes forgiving and forgetting sound awfully appealing. The country is in deep economic trouble. The days and weeks after 9/11 were really, really scary. We need our intelligence officials to be able to keep us safe without having to look over their shoulders. Good people shouldn't be punished for the bad legal advice they received. Bygones. But is the short-term comfort of saying we're over it worth the long-term cost of having become torturers and then cavalierly gotten over it? Because the real risk of getting over it is the possibility that it happens all over again.
