How America turned to torture
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AMERICANS have a right to know what their government does in their name. Over the objections of some intelligence professionals and former members of the Bush administration, President Obama ordered the release Thursday of lightly redacted Justice Department memos from 2002 and 2005 authorizing the CIA to use brutal interrogation techniques on high-value Al Qaeda suspects. In doing so, he struck a balance between national security interests and the principle of accountability.
Obama was right to release the memos, which provide legal cover for at least one technique that is plainly a form of torture - waterboarding. A tougher call is whether he was also right to assure CIA interrogators who relied on Justice Department advice that they will not face federal prosecution. Torture violates US law and the Geneva Conventions. Human-rights advocates rightly ask why a person who actually waterboarded a suspected terrorist should not be charged with a crime.
But Obama must consider the precedent he would set if one Justice Department prosecuted CIA officers for acts that a previous Justice Department had ruled within the law. Were that to happen, intelligence officers could not have faith in the validity of any future legal opinion from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. All such opinions would have to be considered questionable and subject to revision.
Besides, final responsibility for torture lies with those who authorized it; they deserve no chance to push the blame toward interrogators on the ground. For that reason, Congress should be investigating the Bush administration's use of techniques that fit the definition of torture.
Reflecting an understandable presidential perspective, Obama has been emphatic about wanting to look forward, not backward. "This is a time for reflection, not retribution," he said Thursday in his statement on the release of the torture memos.
Still, neither Obama nor Attorney General Eric Holder has ruled out prosecution of those Bush administration officials who authorized these methods. This is a crucial distinction. Obama is not limiting accountability to a release of declassified documents. And he is not treating past incidents of torture purely as a pragmatic problem requiring him to balance CIA morale against America's moral standing in the world.
Fortunately, Obama seems to understand the magnitude of what has happened: Government lawyers found it in themselves to approve techniques that were considered war crimes when used against Americans in World War II. Making the torture memos public is the first step toward repairing the moral corrosion that they represent.
