U.S. future depends on torture accountability
We
cannot let mistakes of the past haunt our future
By
Keith Olbermann Read Spanish Version
This
commentary was presented during the MSNBC program Countdown
As
promised, a Special Comment now on the president’s revelation of the
remainder of this nightmare of Bush Administration torture memos.
This President has gone where few before him, dared. The dirty
laundry — illegal, un-American, self-defeating, self-destroying —
is out for all to see.
Mr. Obama deserves our praise and our
thanks for that. And yet he has gone but half-way. And, in this case,
in far too many respects, half the distance is worse than standing
still. Today, Mr. President, in acknowledging these
science-fiction-like documents, you said that:
"This is
a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views
and emotions that these issues evoke."
"We have been
through a dark and painful chapter in our history.
"But
at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will
be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”
Mr. President, you are wrong. What you describe would be not
"spent energy" but catharsis.
Not "blame laid,"
but responsibility ascribed. You continued:
"Our
national greatness is embedded in America’s ability to right its
course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with
confidence. That is why we must resist the forces that divide us, and
instead come together on behalf of our common future."
Indeed
we must, Mr. President. And the forces of which you speak are the
ones lingering — with pervasive stench — from the previous
administration. Far more than a criminal stench, Sir. An immoral one.
One we cannot let be re-created.
One,
President Obama, it is your responsibility to make sure cannot be
re-created. Forgive me for quoting from a Comment I offered the night
before the inauguration. But this goes to the core of the President’s
commendable, but wholly naive, intention. This country has never
"moved forward with confidence" without first cleansing
itself of its mistaken past.
In point of fact, every effort
to merely draw a line in the sand and declare the past dead has
served only to keep the past alive and often to strengthen it. We
"moved forward" with slavery in the Declaration of
Independence and the Constitution. And four score and nine years
later, we had buried 600,000 of our sons and brothers, in a Civil
War.
After that war’s ending, we "moved forward"
without the social restructuring — and protection of the rights of
minorities — in the south. And a century later, we had not only not
resolved anything, but black leaders were still being assassinated in
our southern cities.
We "moved forward" with
Germany in the reconstruction of Europe after the First World War.
Nobody even arrested the German Kaiser, let alone conducted war
crimes trials then. And 19 years later, there was an indescribably
more evil Germany and a more heart-rending Second World War.
We
"moved forward" with the trusts of the early 1900s. And
today, we are at the mercy of corporations too big to fail. We "moved
forward" with the Palmer Raids and got McCarthyism.
And we
"moved forward" with McCarthyism and got Watergate. We
"moved forward" with Watergate and junior members of the
Ford administration realized how little was ultimately at risk.
They grew up to be Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld and
Dick Cheney. But, Mr. President, when you say we must "come
together on behalf of our common future" you are entirely
correct. We must focus on getting things right in the future, as
opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past.
That
means prosecuting all those involved in the Bush administration’s
torture of prisoners, even if the results are nominal punishments, or
merely new laws. Your only other option is to let this set and fester
indefinitely. Because, Sir, some day there will be another Republican
president, or even a Democrat just as blind as Mr. Bush to ethics and
this country’s moral force. And he will look back to what you did
about Mr. Bush. Or what you did not do.
And he will see
precedent. Or as Cheney saw, he will see how not to get caught next
time. Prosecute, Mr. President. Even if you get not one conviction,
you will still have accomplished good for generations unborn.
Merely by acting, you will deny a further wrong — that this
construction will enter the history books: Torture was legal. It
worked. It saved the country.
The end. This must not be. "It
is our intention," you said today, "to assure those who
carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from
the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to
prosecution." Mr. President, you are making history’s easiest,
most often made, most dangerous mistake — you are accepting the
defense that somebody was "just following orders." At the
end of his first year in office, Mr. Lincoln tried to contextualize
the Civil War for those who still wanted to compromise with evils of
secession and slavery. "The struggle of today," Lincoln
wrote, "is not altogether for today. It is for a vast future
also."
Mr. President, you have now been handed the
beginning of that future. Use it to protect our children and our
distant descendants from anything like this ever happening again —
by showing them that those who did this, were neither unfairly
scapegoated nor absolved. It is good to say "we won’t do it
again." It is not, however…enough.
Keith
Olbermann is anchor in the MSNBC TV program “Countdown.”
