The long shadow of torture
by digby
So, I read this horrifying story in Mother Jones about war crimes in the Syrian civil warand it turned my stomach. The government seems to be most culpable but the rebels are hardly paragons in this regard either. This is a very sick situation.
Unfortunately, the US is itself implicated in this in ways that should be reckoned with. This, for instance:
Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen, was travelling home to Canada from visiting relatives in Tunisia in 2002. While changing planes at New York City’s JFK airport, he was detained by U.S. authorities and then transferred secretly to Syria, where he was held for a year and tortured.
“It was so painful,” Maher Arar said of the beatings he endured, “that I forgot every enjoyable moment in my life.”
Released without charge and allowed to return home to Canada, Maher Arar received an apology and compensation from the Canadian government for its role in his treatment. But the U.S. government has failed to apologize or offer Maher Arar any form of remedy – despite its obligation to do so under the UN Convention Against Torture and other human rights treaties
Jonathan Bernstein wrote an interesting piece a few days ago discussing the fact that the administration’s refusal to openly deal with the torture question is partially responsible for the GOP finally losing its foreign policy establishment wing that could have normally been counted upon to work constructively on serious issues. He wrote:
Was it inevitable that Republicans would wind up behaving on foreign policy and national security pretty much the same way they behave on domestic policy? After all, politics has never completely stopped at the water’s edge. And some breakup was very likely after the Iraq War, just as the Democratic side of the foreign-policy establishment suffered a breakdown after Vietnam.
And yet … unlike the Democrats with Vietnam, the Republicans certainly could have blamed Iraq on just one faction within the party, and found a way to excuse and rehabilitate a large part of its mainstream foreign-policy community. But that didn’t happen.
The reason? I think a lot of it had to do with torture.
Republicans in the Bush administration didn’t just have to answer for a spectacular policy failure; they also were involved in war crimes. Or, they—and their friends outside the administration—had friends who were involved in war crimes. Leaving that situation unresolved was poison; it made re-establishing an “establishment”-type foreign policy/national security community dependent on, essentially saying one’s friends had not only been wrong on policy, but that they were also particularly heinous criminals. Much easier to simply ignore it—after all, the Democratic anti-torture president was ignoring it. But that meant that the torture apologists (and Muslim-bashers, and otherwise very much non-establishment folks) remained extremely visible voices of the GOP on national security. There simply were no grounds on which to rule out the worst voices without essentially saying that the rest of the lot probably should be in jail.
So there was no reckoning within the GOP. Even worse: with a Democrat in the White House, the Republican default complaint was often going to be “not tough enough,” and the people most likely to make that case, irresponsibly if necessary, were the exact same people most likely to be torturers or torture apologists. There’s nothing at all wrong with one party tending to emphasize force and “toughness” and the other to emphasize diplomacy (and, yes, I know that in actual fact the Obama Administration used or threatened to use force repeatedly); but in this particular situation that meant that the people in the GOP who counted were usually the ones who had been most discredited during the Bush presidency—so that, for example, John Yoo is the go-to Republican for questions about executive power. And, more to the point here, the ones most likely to have purely partisan reactions to new policy questions, rather than working with the Democratic administration.
I’m not entirely convinced that a torture accountability program like pardons combined with a truth and reconciliation commission as Bernstein proposes (and I’ve endorsed in the past) would have had this effect on the Republicans, but it certainly would have helped the US in the world.
The Syrian atrocities are not the fault of the United States. That responsibility rests squarely with the people who are perpetrating them. But the fact that the US failed to deal with its own problem of torture has rendered its condemnations of other war crimes much more hollow than they used to be. And that weakens our ability to create any kind of framework to stop, much less punish, such actions. It wouldn’t be an easy thing to do in any case. But it’s harder now.
As Bernstein says, dealing with the torture question:
… would have helped restore the reputation abroad of the United States.
It’s simple: ignoring torture as much as he could has won short-term gains for Barack Obama in that he ducked a fight that could have been ugly … but at a much larger cost to his presidency over the long term. It’s too late to do anything about it before the Syria episode is resolved, but torture still casts a long shadow over U.S. policy, and over his presidency. It’s time for him to act.
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