Quibble all you want, but we, the United States of America, tortured people. We tortured quite a few of them, brutally and over a long period of time, and in some cases those we tortured were completely innocent. In several cases, people died during torture.
Yes, those who endorsed and conducted that torture continue to reject use of that word, but they know better. You can tell they know better by how vehemently they argued against Tuesday’s release of a U.S. Senate report. They tortured, they aren’t proud of it, and they don’t want the world to know what they did.
And again, quibble all you want about the supposed rationale for torture. We tortured because we were scared. We let the terrorists win. We lacked the courage of our convictions, and we let them frighten us into abandoning what we knew to be right, even though the threat that we faced and continue to face from terrorists is far less grave than the threat we faced during World War II or even the Cold War.
We let ourselves be frightened into shaming ourselves, our country and its traditions. Even worse, our leaders were willing, eager co-conspirators in that fear-mongering. Rather than reassure us, they dialed the fear upward because our fear gave them more freedom to do what they wanted, up to and including a disastrous invasion of Iraq.
A lot of people will be angered by the release of the Senate report, and its contents are likely to cause us a lot of problems overseas. That’s deeply unfortunate, but the problem isn’t the revelation that such behavior occurred. Again, the problem is that the behavior occurred in the first place. Keeping that knowledge bottled up, where it still can be officially denied, would merely raise the odds that we will make the same mistake again.
We have a choice and always have a choice: Some would have us merely pretend to be that shining city on the hill that Ronald Reagan used to describe us as; they want to stir up anger at those who would dare to expose that as mere pretense. Others, fortunately, are more courageous, and propose that we actually try to live up to that lofty goal, and to get angry at those who cause us to fall short and try to do better.
In that regard, the most reassuring aspect of this entire scandal is that maybe, in the end and through stubborn leadership from Sen. Dianne Feinstein and others, we are belatedly acknowledging the truth of much of what happened. That’s a start. As Feinstein wrote in releasing the report, “We cannot again allow history to be forgotten and grievous past mistakes to be repeated.”
However, it’s also important that we not seek scapegoats upon whom we can all pile our guilt through prosecution and feel ourselves cleansed. We all knew, or at least had grounds to know, that agents of the U.S. government were engaging in and abetting torture in our name, yet through those years, we as a nation allowed it to continue anyway. There was no great groundswell of outrage against it. President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzalez — yes, they each played major roles, but the nation as a whole was complicit.
In short, this will be a stain on our national honor, and it ought to be. We chickened out, that’s just the truth. When the test came, we chickened out.
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