Whole truth about Guantanamo needed

Susan Crawford did her country a big favor by telling us what we already knew: The United States of America — our nation, a country that has long taken justified pride in its role as a champion of human rights — tortured suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay.

“I sympathize with the intelligence gatherers in those days after 9/11, not knowing what was coming next and trying to gain information to keep us safe,” Crawford told the Washington Post. “But there still has to be a line that we should not cross. And unfortunately what this has done, I think, has tainted everything going forward.”

JAY BOOKMAN
MY OPINION

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What makes that statement notable is Crawford herself and the role she plays.

A lifelong Republican, she served as Army general counsel under President Reagan; under the elder President Bush, she was appointed the Pentagon’s inspector general. Those are both important national-security jobs. Under the current Bush administration, Crawford was appointed to a third major national security role, overseeing the military commissions created to try prisoners at Guantanamo.

What she discovered in that job left her aghast.

“It did shock me,” she said. “I was upset by it. I was embarrassed by it. If we tolerate this and allow it, then how can we object when our servicemen and women, or others in foreign service, are captured and subjected to the same techniques? How can we complain? Where is our moral authority to complain? Well, we may have lost it.”

President-elect Barack Obama is now left with the task of trying to regain what has been lost and clean up this mess, including closing Guantanamo.

In one indication of the complexity of the task, the Pentagon this week announced that 18 of those already released from Guantanamo have been “confirmed” as returning to terrorism, with another 43 having a “plausible” link with terrorist activity.

There are several ways to look at that number. If those at Guantanamo were really “the worst of the worst,” as Donald Rumsfeld described them years ago, then surely many more than 18 of the more than 550 released since then would have returned to terrorism. Those numbers suggest that we vastly overreacted in imprisoning so many there.

More importantly, counter-terror experts will tell you that what happened at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib has radicalized hundreds and more likely thousands of Muslims, many more times than the 18 who have allegedly returned to violence. It is yet another example of a U.S. policy that has created more enemies than it takes out of circulation.

Obama also faces a decision in how to proceed internally. While torture is a crime under both American and international law, the Bush administration has adamantly maintained that no felony was committed at Guantanamo and elsewhere. It argues in effect that because its lawyers had ruled beforehand that no crime was being committed, no crime was committed.

Personally, I have no interest in prosecuting Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, George Bush and anybody else. It would be unfair to turn them into convenient scapegoats for our collective national guilt. Yes, some Americans did protest the use of torture; yes, some brave American lawyers did challenge their own government in defense of basic human rights. But they were the exceptions, not the rule.

What was done in Guantanamo was not a secret to the American people, and it was supported at the time by a substantial majority of us. The shame is ours as a nation and should not be shunted off onto individuals. That would merely compound our hypocrisy.

However, lack of prosecution should not be an excuse to hide the truth from ourselves. We ought to know — we need to know — exactly what was done in our name. A commission should be empowered to give us what the piecemeal testimony of Crawford and others cannot, a comprehensive look at just what we did, to whom and why. If there is testimony that such steps were necessary, we should hear that too.

Because dark secrets lose their poison when dragged out into the light of day.