Naomi Wolf: Investigating Torture, Congress? Look in the Mirror.
|
Tweet this story! Support our efforts for a sustainable world.
|
|
Naomi Wolf, author of The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, warns that going after rank-and-file soldiers and operatives who committed torture is just scapegoating at its shameful worst. As in the Nuremberg trials, we need to go after and prosecute the masterminds—the architects of the legal rationale, and those at the top who handed down the orders—starting with Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, and Bush.
From the Huffington Post:
As citizens’ outrage over the torture memos heats up, and Congress is barraged with calls to appoint a special prosecutor, we may be about to commit an egregious error.
Today Republicans accused Democrats in Congress of having “blood on your hands too” in relation to the escalating calls to investigate. I would like to say that this is exactly right.
I will go further: not only do Congressional Democrats have “blood on their hands” — but so do we, the American people. And CIA agents may be about to be sacrificed to assuage their, and our, guilt.
Today’s suddenly urgent calls by our Congressional Democratic leaders, and even by many of the American people, to prosecute CIA operatives, military men and women and contractors who were certainly involved with, colluded in or turned a blind eye to torture are not only the height of hypocrisy, they are a form of unconscionable scapegoating. The scapegoating is political on the part of Congressional leaders, and psychological on the part of many Americans who are now “shocked, shocked” at what was done in their name.
Hello, America? Hello? Were you asleep for the past seven years? The fact that the Bush administration used torture for the past seven years has been the furthest thing from a secret. When the political winds were with the last administration, which framed qualms about torture as being soft on “the war on terror,” just about every Congressional Democrat fell right into line to accept it, if not cheer it on. Even Hillary Clinton supported torture, right up through her Presidential run. Nancy Pelosi was briefed on the torture in closed-door meetings. When activist groups and citizens called for a special prosecutor, all we heard from Congressional Democrats was that they did not wish to spend the political capital. […]
So we should call for former chief judge of the army General James Cullen’s solution. He has been at the forefront of calling for accountability — but the right kind of accountability: Cullen urges us to indemnify those lower down the chain of command to get their testimonies. So they implicate the ringleaders, and then the only people who should be prosecuted are, as at Nuremberg, those who directed otherwise honorable men and women to commit crimes: the lawyers, and those who are on record having given the orders: Rice, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush himself. The psychiatrist who reverse-engineered the SERE tactics should be prosecuted as well.
Related articles:
