Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses
Since
the day President Obama took office, he has failed to bring to justice
anyone responsible for the torture of terrorism suspects — an official
government program conceived and carried out in the years after the
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
He
did allow his Justice Department to investigate the C.I.A.'s
destruction of videotapes of torture sessions and those who may have
gone beyond the torture techniques authorized by President George W.
Bush. But the investigation did not lead to any charges being filed, or even any accounting of why they were not filed.
Mr. Obama has said
multiple times that “we need to look forward as opposed to looking
backwards,” as though the two were incompatible. They are not. The
nation cannot move forward in any meaningful way without coming to
terms, legally and morally, with the abhorrent acts that were
authorized, given a false patina of legality, and committed by American
men and women from the highest levels of government on down.
Americans have known about many of these acts for years, but the 524-page executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report erases any lingering doubt about their depravity and illegality: In addition to new revelations of sadistic tactics like “rectal feeding,”
scores of detainees were waterboarded, hung by their wrists, confined
in coffins, sleep-deprived, threatened with death or brutally beaten. In
November 2002, one detainee who was chained to a concrete floor died of
“suspected hypothermia.”
These are, simply, crimes. They are prohibited by federal law, which defines torture as the intentional infliction of “severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” They are also banned by the Convention Against Torture, the international treaty that the United States ratified in 1994 and that requires prosecution of any acts of torture.
