RangerDave wrote:
There would have to be a careful appraisal of what can and can't be publicly released, but just because some disclosures could be damaging doesn't mean all disclosures would be. And, frankly, I am willing to accept some damage to our intelligence operations and international relations if that's the price we have to pay to hold people accountable for torture and help ensure this **** doesn't happen again. I know you don't agree, but I believe that the normalization of torture in the last decade is an enormously shameful and destructive turn for this country, and it absolutely has to be reversed.
First, torture hasn't been "normalized" during the last decade. The programs you're discussing have been ended and are the cause of ongoing angst, not to mention the congressional hearings and report Khross pointed out. The idea that "normalization" has occurred is absolutely laughable. It hasn't; that's precisely what's driving this discussion. It's been the opposite of normalized; normalization is what other countries have going on, all hoping that attention paid to us on this issue will prevent the de-normalization of whatever they have going on.
Second, exactly what "shameful and destructive" aspects has it had? The harm you're describing
comes from the publicity the program was accorded. You're just demanding more of the same.
Do you think that this would somehow prevent it in the future? It won't. Secret programs are, by definition, secret. You can't prove they don't exist. When they do come to light people act surprised and shocked, but had they never come to light we would not even be having a debate on the subject. Even if they never happen again, people will
insist on believing that they do for their own political purposes.
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I disagree. Despite my liberal bent, I do believe there is moral value in retributive justice. More importantly, though, I think criminal prosecutions is the only real way to prevent future **** ups of this kind. If no one goes to jail or even gets publicly named and shamed, there's much less disincentive for would-be bad actors to refrain from their bad acts in the future. If getting caught just means a talking-to from some committee and maybe having to resign, followed by a book deal with Regenery so you can tell the world that you and your ilk are the real patriots making the hard decisions for everyone else, people in power will continue to flout the law (and basic morality) as they see fit. Start handing out 10+ years in federal prison, though, and folks will think twice the next time.
As long as that retributive justice is aimed at the right people.
Why do we want people to think twice next time? Because "that isn't what America is about?" The actual harm done to this country is contained entirely in the publicity accorded to these practices once they were discovered; publicity which served the political purposes of the left and numerous foreign states. The entirety of the "**** up" was in letting it ever be discovered, and in lying to the Administration to get them to sanction a program that wasn't accomplishing much of anything.
Why are we so concerned about this, beyond protecting people's sensibilities? So that it can be another boogeyman to scare people with in elections?
Or is it because we did it at the end of WWII and we feel the need for consistency? Maybe we should have thought about that before we allowed the Soviets to sit on the Nurnburg trials, despite their invasions of Poland and Finland - the latter of which was a liberal democracy forced into allying with the Axis. I have no problem with victor's justice for Nazis but we should never have dressed it up as a legal proceeding.
The entire history of this issue is one endless morass of inconsistency, expediency, and selective enforcement world-wide, invariably for political purposes. All you're really doing is asking for yet another such action to be taken for the ends you find desirable - in this case, satisfying your own moral outrage. You aren't showing any real benefit to be had, nor any meaningful actual harm on the national scale that we need to remedy.
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