What to Do In Response to the CIA Report?
There is an interesting editorial in the Washington Post today, highlighting the indignities of the previous administration’s torture policies laid out in the recently released 2004 report from the CIA inspector general, and explaining the predicament the current administration finds itself in assessing whether or not to prosecute:
The line between authorized interrogation techniques and those that were not approved seems capricious. Which is worse: Withholding sleep for 11 days or threatening to kill someone’s children? Waterboarding or revving a power drill near a naked, hooded detainee? The first were blessed by the lawyers at the Bush Justice Department, who pronounced, incredibly, that they did not constitute torture. President Obama and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. have said, correctly in our view, that CIA operatives who acted in good-faith reliance on that twisted advice will not be subject to criminal prosecution.
What to do, then, about conduct that was not explicitly allowed? The flip side of shielding those who followed the rules is that those who went beyond what was permitted are subject to being charged with torture.
This report, along with what we already know, is undoubtedly just the tip of the torture iceberg. Recently there has been talk about creating a “truth commission” or panel to investigate potential crimes and misdeeds committed by officials in the previous administration.
ASP Senior Fellow Dr. Bernard Finel wrote an op-ed for the Philadelphia Daily News in May highlighting the possibility of a truth commission to investigate the previous administration’s abuses, in order to restore checks and balances within the executive branch:
“BUT WE can only recover this powerful constraint on executive power if there are consequences for senior officials who ignore their professional obligations. An under-discussed reason to consider a truth commission to investigate the conduct of the Bush administration would be to shed light on the failure of some senior officials to live up to their ethical and legal responsibilities as lawyers, officers and public servants.”
It will be interesting to see what path the Department of Justice, and Congress, take moving forward with these newly released facts. Only time will tell.
