Time for Justice

Last week, the Senate Armed Services Committee issued a joint report accusing Bush Administration officials of creating an atmosphere that permitted torture by U.S. military and intelligence officials and that led to the institutionalization of grave prisoner abuse.

The joint bi-partison report confirmed findings by a number of administration critics and also journalists (most notably Jane Meyer in her book, "The Dark Side: How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals") who contended that high-ranking officials in the Bush White House, at the Pentagon and State Department actively promoted torture as a means of fighting terrorism despite solid evidence that it doesn't work. I wrote about this issue last month.

Unfortunately, it seems the Senate report has sparked little mainstream interest of the American public.

But in today's New York Times, the newspaper's editorial staff published a searing, 1200-word editorial that lays out a compelling case for bringing the chief architects of the Bush Administration torture policies to justice, namely Donald Rumsfeld, William J. Haynes and David Addington.

It's a start, but more must be done. If our ideals are as sacred as we claim them to be, then the most important statement we can make as Americans is to police ourselves. The actions of this administration has severely damaged our standing in the world and it's time we set things right again. A good start would be to show that we know the difference between right and wrong.

Below are excerpts from the Times' editorial. The rest of it can be found here. You can also find links to downloading the Senate report here.

Most Americans have long known that the horrors of Abu Ghraib were not the work of a few low-ranking sociopaths. All but President Bush’s most unquestioning supporters recognized the chain of unprincipled decisions that led to the abuse, torture and death in prisons run by the American military and intelligence services.

Now, a bipartisan report by the Senate Armed Services Committee has made what amounts to a strong case for bringing criminal charges against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; his legal counsel, William J. Haynes; and potentially other top officials, including the former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.

The report shows how actions by these men “led directly” to what happened at Abu Ghraib, in Afghanistan, in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in secret C.I.A. prisons.

It said these top officials, charged with defending the Constitution and America’s standing in the world, methodically introduced interrogation practices based on illegal tortures devised by Chinese agents during the Korean War. Until the Bush administration, their only use in the United States was to train soldiers to resist what might be done to them if they were captured by a lawless enemy.

The officials then issued legally and morally bankrupt documents to justify their actions, starting with a presidential order saying that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to prisoners of the “war on terror” — the first time any democratic nation had unilaterally reinterpreted the conventions...

...One page of the report lists the repeated objections that President Bush and his aides so blithely and arrogantly ignored: The Air Force had “serious concerns regarding the legality of many of the proposed techniques”; the chief legal adviser to the military’s criminal investigative task force said they were of dubious value and may subject soldiers to prosecution; one of the Army’s top lawyers said some techniques that stopped well short of the horrifying practice of waterboarding “may violate the torture statute.” The Marines said they “arguably violate federal law.” The Navy pleaded for a real review.

The legal counsel to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time started that review but told the Senate committee that her boss, Gen. Richard Myers, ordered her to stop on the instructions of Mr. Rumsfeld’s legal counsel, Mr. Haynes....

....We expect Mr. Obama to keep the promise he made over and over in the campaign — to cheering crowds at campaign rallies and in other places, including our office in New York. He said one of his first acts as president would be to order a review of all of Mr. Bush’s executive orders and reverse those that eroded civil liberties and the rule of law.

That job will fall to Eric Holder, a veteran prosecutor who has been chosen as attorney general, and Gregory Craig, a lawyer with extensive national security experience who has been selected as Mr. Obama’s White House counsel.

A good place for them to start would be to reverse Mr. Bush’s disastrous order of Feb. 7, 2002, declaring that the United States was no longer legally committed to comply with the Geneva Conventions.