There are plenty of torture-related news items available today, each more discouraging than the next.
An Australian citizen, for example, was apparently transferred by U.S. officials to Egypt in 2001, where he was tortured for six months before being flown to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay. In addition, newly-released documents show that the FBI knew and complained about torture policies as early as 2002, but were told not to worry about the abuse because the Pentagon approved the tactics being used. We also learned that Army doctors, instead of just giving the torturers medical files, actually participated in the abuse.
And then there’s the matter of Alberto Gonzales, our would-be attorney general. We learned today that from now on, he’s not going to endorse U.S. torture policies. We also learned that the White House refuses to provide senators documents on attorney Gonzales’ involvement with crafting the administration’s torture policies. (Senators are supposed to take the White House’s word for it and confirm Gonzales anyway.)
This underlying indignation of the entire fiasco was captured perfectly by Mark Danner today in a New York Times op-ed. He doesn’t come right out and say, “Where’s the outrage?” but he makes the case anyway.
At least since Watergate, Americans have come to take for granted a certain story line of scandal, in which revelation is followed by investigation, adjudication and expiation. Together, Congress and the courts investigate high-level wrongdoing and place it in a carefully constructed narrative, in which crimes are charted, malfeasance is explicated and punishment is apportioned as the final step in the journey back to order, justice and propriety.
When Alberto Gonzales takes his seat before the Senate Judiciary Committee today for hearings to confirm whether he will become attorney general of the United States, Americans will bid farewell to that comforting story line. The senators are likely to give full legitimacy to a path that the Bush administration set the country on more than three years ago, a path that has transformed the United States from a country that condemned torture and forbade its use to one that practices torture routinely. Through a process of redefinition largely overseen by Mr. Gonzales himself, a practice that was once a clear and abhorrent violation of the law has become in effect the law of the land.
Indeed, those who helped shape and implement the practice keep getting promoted.
No one in a position of authority is punished, no independent investigations have been launched, information is kept hidden, lies are exposed — and no one seems too worked up about it.
We have entered a new era; the traditional story line in which scandal leads to investigation and investigation leads to punishment has been supplanted by something else. Wrongdoing is still exposed; we gaze at the photographs and read the documents, and then we listen to the president’s spokesman “reiterate,” as he did last week, “the president’s determination that the United States never engage in torture.” And there the story ends.
At present, our government, controlled largely by one party only intermittently harried by a timorous opposition, is unable to mete out punishment or change policy, let alone adequately investigate its own war crimes. And, as administration officials clearly expect, and senators of both parties well understand, most Americans – the Americans who will not read the reports, who will soon forget the photographs and who will be loath to dwell on a repellent subject – are generally content to take the president at his word.
Painful, but true.