Tricky Trail of Blood

The accursed inheritance of the Bush administration shouldn’t be the United States’ shame, but the further one follows the torturer’s bloody trail to higher levels, the trickier it gets for Obama.

Meanwhile, the U.S. has a president the nation and the rest of the world believes, when he says, “The U.S. doesn’t approve of torture.” Of course, George W. Bush used these same, exact words in claiming his administration’s innocence. That excuse was denied to him only after the revelations of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and the no longer secret CIA prisons.

The 43rd president’s denials ended up sounding like the vows of a man denying paternity nine months after an affair, by claiming that when the child was born he was nowhere near the delivery room. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice – they all knew what they condoned in the White House.

Back then, a few months after September 11th, they all feared that the al-Qaeda murderers might strike again. That’s what drove the Republican leadership to break with that which had always been at the core of America: democratic control of power: reverence for justice and respect for human values and rights. And they signed off on that which the CIA and Pentagon warhorses asked them to: a license to torture in the name of national security.

Nobody questioned anything back then; the end justified the means, as well as the so-called improved interrogation techniques. Morals weren’t the only thing swept under George Bush’s strategy table in his global war on terror.

Any thoughts that prisoners fearing for their lives might not tell the truth were quickly shoved aside. That was Dick Cheney’s pig-headed philosophy and he still believes it to this day. At least he’s honest in recounting it: He claims the government-sanctioned torture worked, and if it was right yesterday, it can’t be wrong today.

From Cheney’s viewpoint, that’s the end of the matter. For Barack Obama, on the other hand, the problems are just now beginning. With the change of regime, he inherited George Bush’s shame in the form of a mountain of files and now he’s obligated – perhaps by taking responsibility for the cleanup, perhaps by prosecuting the wrongdoers – to ensure that further shame doesn’t end up on America’s doorstep.

The President is still groping for the middle ground. On one side there’s a general pardon for the CIA agents who did the dirty work in the dust and mildew of secret black holes.

Obama considers these government employees less as torturers than as menial servants, and he frees them, because they relied on unspeakable memos from the Justice Department assuring them everything they did was legal. Still, the euphoric tone the President used in praising them for their actions (“You are the point of the sword!”) is astonishing.

It gets trickier for Obama the higher the torturers’ bloody trail leads. The former Justice Department bureaucrats, for example, who approved maltreatment on a large scale, should now be held accountable.

The next higher echelon will be even trickier. The Senate recently made an investigative report public in which there is a clear chain of circumstantial evidence against former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, showing his responsibility for the shameful and disgraceful events that took place at Abu Ghraib prison.

Obama cannot and should not ignore all this. But as President of all Americans, he also cannot unilaterally pass judgment on Rumsfeld, himself.

That’s why he’s considering the idea of placing the matter in the hands of an independent commission. He sees that as an act of reconciliation, but he must be careful that it won’t turn out to be just an excuse for forgetting the whole episode.