Harry Reid's Incoherent Opposition to a Truth Commission

Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet at 11:35 AM on April 24, 2009.

This is Harry Reid on proposals to establish a "truth commission" to investigate torture and other abuses in the "War on Terror" (as quoted by The Hill):

“It would be very unwise, from my perspective, to start having commissions, boards, tribunals until we find out what the facts are, and I don’t know of a better way of getting the facts than through the Intelligence Committee,” said Reid.

I'm hard pressed to recall a more ludicrous statement. He's saying: 'We can't establish an investigation into the facts until we get all the facts.'

And he doesn't know a better way of getting facts than through the Intelligence Committee. That'd be the same committee which promised  in 2004 to investigate the pre-war "intelligence" used to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and issued a report four years later that ignored all the available evidence that White House officials had pressured analysts to tell them what they wanted to hear. White-wash? You betcha.

Anyway, there's a lot of debate about whether to hold people accountable for torture, and, if so, whom. And a lot of folks are arguing that lower-level CIA operatives who conducted those "coercive interrogations" shouldn't be prosecuted. They were, after all, just following orders. And, unlike others who offered the same defense in the past, they had those slick legal memos to cover their asses.

I'm not wholly unsympathetic to the argument -- or to the related argument that going after the rank-and-file is a means of absolving those further up the food chain.

But lost in the discussion, it seems to me, is that justice isn't just about retribution or revenge, but deterrence. There's clearly quite a bit of resistance within the Obama administration and among Congressional leaders to go after those at the top -- too partisan, they say, too political... looking backwards instead of forward. And while those who formulated the policy certainly should be held to account for their crimes (and I'm not suggesting otherwise -- the debate seems based on a false choice), I think a lot of people are forgetting about the value of prosecuting those further down the chain of command in terms of deterring future abuses.

If those who actually carried out orders to violate the law were prosecuted, it might be a betrayal by their bosses, yes, but those prosecutions would become deeply embedded in the institutional memories of the CIA and other intelligence agencies. And maybe a few decades down the road, when we've white-washed this current blot on our history as we have all the others, and another Bush or Cheney were to come along and issue similarly illegal orders, those future "low-level operatives" would remember that if it goes wrong, they're the ones who will be left holding the bag. And maybe, just maybe, they'd refuse to do it.

Tagged as: torture, reid

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.