David Cole
In the face of overwhelming evidence that numerous US detainees were tortured during the Bush years, President Barack Obama has famously said he wants to “look forward, not back.” He prohibited the use of torture and cruelty in one of his first executive acts, but since then he has consistently resisted all efforts to hold accountable those who, under the prior administration, authorized such mistreatment. He has opposed a commission of inquiry, failed to order a criminal investigation of high-level officials who authorized—and concocted legal justifications for—torture, and successfully defeated all suits seeking damages for victims. Unacknowledged guilt, however, has a stubborn way of sticking around. In recent days, torture has been back in the national conversation, raising once again the issue of what we (and others) should do about it.
First came the news that former President George W. Bush, in his memoir, Decision Points, admitted that he personally authorized the waterboarding of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. (“Damn right,” the former president said he answered CIA director George Tenet, when Tenet asked whether it was okay to use this and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” on KSM.) Bush’s startling admission that he ordered a war crime appears to reflect a calculated judgment that President Obama’s unwillingness to look back will protect the former president from any investigation or prosecution. And if the president himself admits he did it and gets away with it, how can the government hold accountable anyone under him?
Then came the announcement on November 16 that the United Kingdom has agreed to pay former Guantánamo detainees who are British citizens or residents millions of pounds in damages to settle lawsuits alleging British complicity in the men’s torture. The men describe being tortured at CIA black sites, at Guantánamo, and in third countries to which the CIA delivered them. The UK did not order or conduct the torture itself, nor deliver the men to their torturers; its involvement seems to have been limited to awareness that coercive interrogations were taking place and possibly providing lines of questioning to the interrogators. Yet the UK is willing to pay millions in damages for its part in the wrongs done.
Ken Clarke, the UK’s Secretary of State for Justice, explained that the government sought to avoid a court order that it disclose hundreds of thousands of documents, many of which contained confidential information—and presumably much of which might implicate not only officials of MI5 and MI6, but also their interlocutors in the CIA. A cynic might argue that the settlement is less a reflection of accountability than a willingness to pay millions of pounds to avoid accountability. But in July, Prime Minister David Cameron ordered an official inquiry into charges of Britain’s complicity in torture, and appointed a retired appeals judge, Sir Peter Gibson, to run the inquiry. As with the Canadian government, who investigated and paid compensation for their complicity in the rendition and torture of Maher Arar, the British, it appears, are not afraid to look back, or to compensate victims of torture.
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http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/nov/18/obamas-torture-problem/
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