The reality of the anti-torture laws is becoming more clear to even our press corps

Nick Anderson of the Houston Chronicle gets it right:


So does Paul Krugman in Reclaiming America's Soul New York Times 04/24/09. He makes a clear statement about what is needed for transitional justice, the legal actions that need to be taken to move back to the rule of law:

And there are indeed immense challenges out there: an economic crisis, a health care crisis, an environmental crisis. Isn’t revisiting the abuses of the last eight years, no matter how bad they were, a luxury we can’t afford?

No, it isn’t, because America is more than a collection of policies. We are, or at least we used to be, a nation of moral ideals. In the past, our government has sometimes done an imperfect job of upholding those ideals. But never before have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for. "This government does not torture people," declared former President Bush, but it did, and all the world knows it.

And the only way we can regain our moral compass, not just for the sake of our position in the world, but for the sake of our own national conscience, is to investigate how that happened, and, if necessary, to prosecute those responsible.

One very important thing about this Krugman column is that he also addresses the question of whether this actually would interfere with Obama's other priorities. The law is the law and needs to be enforced regardless of whether it's politically awkward for Obama or anyone else. But I've been amazed at how Democrats seem to be assuming that it's politically bad for them if they expose the full extent of Republican criminality in the torture policy. But if Democrats are implicated criminally or otherwise in the torture program, they should be treated by the same legal standards as the other torture perpetrators.

McClatchy's Margaret Talev discusses some of the important specifics that are now being clearly and specifically documented in the public record in Document: Cheney, Rice signed off on interrogation techniques 04/22/09. The broad picture of the torture policy we've known a lot about before. What we're seeing now is specific documentation of the kind that can definitively and in a legal sense show exactly who was telling whom to do what and when.

We still don't know how many people were kept in the Bush Gulag, how many were tortured and how many were killed. I'm still haunted by a comment from Robert Fisk a couple of months ago that if mass graves turn up in connection with this, we'll be dealing with a qualitatively grimmer picture. There are big holes in our knowledge of this. We don't know it's real scope or the number of victims.

Some regular sources for valuable updates on this whole torture story, which has really been breaking fast the whole last week, include: Marcy Wheeler's Emptywheel, Digby's Hullabaloo, Glenn Greenwald's Salon blog, and Scott Horton's No Comment blog at Harper's. Antiwar.com Radio has their Scott Horton in a recent interview with the human-rights-attorney Scott Horton here.

This isn't going away.

Tags: accountability for torture, torture