War Crimes

When I was in the Army, some of the guys in my unit would make a game of tossing rations to kids when we rode in our tracks through villages: as time went on they’d throw the rations closer and closer to the front of the track, and the risk of crushing the children increased. The guy that got a kid to grab a ration the closest to the front of the track “won”.

I have no idea if the particular incident described by Sam Rocha happened; I do know, from sad personal experience, that it is plausible.

Wisdom from Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman concisely summarizes my own position on prosecutions of Bush administration officials. The price for ordering or enabling torture needs to be so unpalatable that no future administration official will dare to attempt it. That pretty much means criminal prosecutions, and, on guilty verdicts, lengthy prison sentences. There really is no other way I can see to insure a non-repeat of the crimes of the last 8 years.

And by the way - if any Democratic member of Congress is implicated in these war crimes (let's just call them what they are), they should stand trial and, if convicted, face lengthy prison sentences also. Torture should mean certain ruin, prison and disgrace to any politician who orders, enables, or abides it.

Krugman:

Isn’t revisiting the abuses of the last eight years, no matter how bad they were, a luxury we can’t afford?

No, it isn’t, because America is more than a collection of policies. We are, or at least we used to be, a nation of moral ideals. In the past, our government has sometimes done an imperfect job of upholding those ideals. But never before have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for. “This government does not torture people,” declared former President Bush, but it did, and all the world knows it.

And the only way we can regain our moral compass, not just for the sake of our position in the world, but for the sake of our own national conscience, is to investigate how that happened, and, if necessary, to prosecute those responsible.

...For the fact is that officials in the Bush administration instituted torture as a policy, misled the nation into a war they wanted to fight and, probably, tortured people in the attempt to extract “confessions” that would justify that war. And during the march to war, most of the political and media establishment looked the other way.

It’s hard, then, not to be cynical when some of the people who should have spoken out against what was happening, but didn’t, now declare that we should forget the whole era — for the sake of the country, of course.

Sorry, but what we really should do for the sake of the country is have investigations both of torture and of the march to war. These investigations should, where appropriate, be followed by prosecutions — not out of vindictiveness, but because this is a nation of laws.

We need to do this for the sake of our future. For this isn’t about looking backward, it’s about looking forward — because it’s about reclaiming America’s soul.

Good Question

Andrew Sullivan asks a good question:

National Journal's national security blog is debating whether we should have a truth commission on torture. Brian Michael Jenkins is against the idea:

A truth commission on torture could be ruinously divisive. It would smack of political vendetta and fuel narrow partisan agendas on both sides. It would lead to spectacle, not edification. It could end up giving rogues the aura of martyrs. Let history be their judge.

To which the only response can be: have we decided as a nation that war crimes should not be prosecuted if they are committed by members of the American government? Are we formally going to withdraw from the Geneva Conventions - or just violate them with impunity while pretending that we take them seriously? Those are the actual questions: not policy matters, but core legal issues that tell you whether a country is governed by the rule of law or not.

My own view is that a "truth commission" is too lenient; prosecutions and, on guilty verdicts, lengthy prison terms are the only way to stop torture from occurring again.

Sully Calls It

Andrew Sullivan, summing up the truth, and the consequences mandated by justice and simple human decency:

This is what happened. 9/11 occurred. Cheney and Bush decided that to get the intelligence they wanted and didn't have, they would start torturing prisoners for information. They told their legal people to provide legal defenses, however strained and bizarre, and talked themselves into believing that it wasn't torture. They set up a major torture camp in Gitmo and many smaller ones around the world; they told their military and CIA to take all the gloves off. They did this consciously and with clear pre-meditation. They stuck with their policy even after its essence was exposed so painfully at Abu Ghraib. They were in too deep to go back then. And they deeply believed that the constitution allowed the president unlimited powers in wartime - and that war time was now for ever. The Constitution, in Cheney's view, empowers the presidency to permanent near-dictatorial status for the indefinite future. The dictatorial powers - unencumbered by no law and no treaty - extend to American citizens and on American soil.

This is what they believed. And this is what they did. It was and is illegal. And immoral. And deeply destructive of the need to garner reliable intelligence and to protect American soldiers from future torture at the hands of the enemy. And the dreadful truth is: Bush clearly had no qualms or conflict in this. But he won't own it. History must make him own it. And the rule of law should make him accountable.

In a perfect world, Bush and Cheney would be arrested right after the Inauguration, and sent to the Hague to stand trial for war crimes.