We Cannot Allow Obama to Be the Torturer-Elect

By Steve Hendricks, AlterNet. Posted January 14, 2009.

The greatest act of repair is the trial and punishment of the criminals: those who ordered the torture, those who implemented it, those who abetted it. The greater the number of senior torturers tried -- Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Ashcroft, Mr. Gonzales, Ms. Rice, Mr. Tenet, and Mr. Rumsfeld for a start -- the fewer trials need be held of torture's thousand grunts and straw bosses. What is vital (I mean the term literally, for lives hang in the balance) is that the tortured have the chance to confront their torturers in court. The victims need the catharsis of seeing the once omnipotent authority brought low, the demi-god made human. They also thirst to be safe again, and though we can never fully slake it, we can partly relieve the thirst by showing that even crimes committed in dark cells in distant wastelands can be brought to light and the criminals punished.

Where trials are not possible (though in America they are) a victim may find lesser relief in a victim-driven truth-and-reconciliation commission of the kind South Africa used to reckon with Apartheid. What will not do is an inquiry of the kind Mr. Obama is contemplating, a variant of the 9/11 Commission, which will give the tortured little public voice, will levy no penalties, and will urge them to "trust the authorities" about an abuse of the highest authority and a savage rupture of trust.

But even trials will not be enough. The United States, having damaged its victims for life, must also offer them care -- medical, psychological, financial -- for life. The innocence or guilt of the victims, all of whom Bush has accused of terrorism and some of whom may be guilty, is irrelevant to our duty. When we repair the individual, we will find we also repair humanity, which is our burden since torture, however we try to forget, is a crime against humanity. Muslim innocents by the million have come to fear our midnight knock, our black hood descending swiftly over their eyes, and they deserve peace from our terror. When we give it to one, we give it to all. In doing so -- here, an argument even an American president might understand -- we also dissuade a few young men from strapping bombs to their chests.

Mr. Obama sent his advisors, rather than himself, to dangle the line on torture because he worried the waters would roil. They did not. Only a few minnows jumped (in the great pond of the American presidency, even Rachel Maddow is a minnow), while down from the mainstream glided schools of pundits and solons to nibble deferentially at Mr. Obama's bait and declare the futility, even immorality, of holding the torturers to their crimes. We must look forward, they said, not backward. We cannot undo what has been done. We are a house divided and would be torn asunder in pursuit of justice -- the last word said derisively or falsely modified with "pie-in-the-sky." Emboldened, the president-elect himself said the same this weekend. But these are old lies, sung often in American ears. We heard them at the end of Reconstruction, when the North hadn't the courage to make blacks the equals of whites and postponed the reckoning the Civil War demanded. The grandchildren of slaves paid for that cowardice day by day, hour by hour in lynchings and rapes and pulverizing poverty until the reckoning came at last, at Little Rock and Selma and the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. We heard the same lies when Washington stank of Vietnam and Watergate, and Ford pardoned Nixon for declaring himself greater than the law, and the press and parties of power nodded their agreement--thus we still await our reckoning with presidents who would be kings. We should suspect by now that when Americans cry they will be torn asunder by reckoning with their crimes, they mean they prefer their victims be torn asunder instead.

Mr. Obama is not to blame that men tortured in our gulag are tortured still. But come January 20 the responsibility will be his, ours. To do nothing is not to do no harm. Indeed, it is not even to do nothing. It is a choice, an act, and a monstrous one. It is not equivalent to the acts of Mr. Bush, which will be judged alongside Franco's or Nero's. Rather, it is the act of Pilate. Mr. Obama knows (for he has often trod it) that an ugly, ill-defined line separates prudence from cowardice. He knows that in a few great matters of state, the same line separates good from evil. He is stepping across that line. Should he not reverse himself, he condemns hundreds or thousands to unending torture and some -- among them a few Amérys and Levis -- to death. Their surnames will be Muslim instead of Jewish this time, but in other essentials they are same. They are men, worthy of dignity, even in sin.

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Steve Hendricks, author of The Unquiet Grave: The FBI and the Struggle for the Soul of Indian Country, is writing a book on American terrorism for W. W. Norton. His website is SteveHendricks.org.

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