Why prosecutions are necessary.

It is an extremely poorly kept secret that I am supporter of investigations and prosecutions into the governments activities with regard to the "War on Terror".

Not as some statement of vengeance against the Bush administration, but as long overdue re commitment to the rule of law.

By our own laws. By our own Constitution. We are bound by the treaties we sign. So the case of Binyam Mohamed stands out.

Once again the estimable Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Sullivan, do the heavy lifting on this issue.

Mr. Greenwald, in this instance, articulates something I have had a very difficult time committing to words, about the nature of the case those who counsel against investigations are making:

It cannot be emphasized enough that those who are arguing against criminal investigations for Bush officials are -- whether consciously or implicitly -- arguing that the U.S., alone in the world, is exempt from the laws and principles which we've been advocating and imposing on other countries for decades. There is simply no way to argue that our leaders should be immunized from criminal investigations for torture and other war crimes without believing that (a) the U.S. is and should be immune from the principles we've long demanded other nations obey and (b) we are free to ignore our treaty obligations any time it suits us.

This seems to me to be the crux of the very argument. That is what I find depressing. Not whether laws were broken or human rights were violated. But about the propriety of it all.

Regardless of whether you think every man, woman, and child currently held in GITMO is a hardened terrorist or not. We have a social compact in this country of ours, which states that we are a country of laws and not of men. We have formed those laws as protection from those who might seek to use power unjustly over their fellow man. We have enforced those laws on other countries and condemned the very acts, that we have instigated, when others partake of them. Yet because we do it, it makes it less bad, or the people we do it to less worthy of humane treatment? People, under the laws of our country, have the right to know what they are charged with, and not to be detained indefinitely with out due process.

Torture under the laws of this land is illegal.

Mr. Sullivan does a wonderful job of defining torture accurately and pointing out the shell game that those who support "enhanced interrogation" are playing.

Some want to define "actual" torture in ways that mean that freezing someone to near-death, or forcing them into weeks of sleeplessness, or stringing them up in excruciating ways until they break, or isolating them indefinitely from any sensory perception, is somehow an "humane alternative" or "not-torture". What they miss - or rather what they refuse to address - is that torture cannot be defined by specific techniques and legally isn't.

Almost any coercive act sustained long enough against a person in captivity can become torture. Think of how we understand the drip-drip-drip of the "Chinese water torture" to be torture. It's not even, as the former vice-president would say, a splash of water on the face. It's a mere drip. But even a drip, sustained long and relentlessly enough, can break a human being. The test for torture is not whether it leaves brutal physical marks or not (that was the Gestapo standard). The test for torture is whether it is of sufficient immediate or cumulative force to rob the capacity of a human being to say voluntarily what he or she knows to be true. It is the imposition of sufficient coercion to destroy an individual's ability to resist giving some kind of answer, true or false, or some unknowable, random blend of the two.

Some wish to paint this as "looking back" or " a partisan witch hunt". That is simply not the case. It is not even an issue of some Manichean right vs. wrong debate. It is quite simply whether we are a nation of laws or not. Whether we met the obligations of that compact. If we are, then we absolutely must investigate. If not, then we should state that, so that other countries and our citizenry understand that our political leaders are not honest brokers on our behalf.

I mentioned Mr. Mohamed above, regardless of what you think of the governments prosecution of the war on terror, this is the sort of thing that should give you pause:

The court papers describe horrific treatment in secret prisons. Mr. Mohamed claimed that during his detention in Morocco, “he was routinely beaten, suffering broken bones and, on occasion, loss of consciousness. His clothes were cut off with a scalpel and the same scalpel was then used to make incisions on his body, including his penis. A hot stinging liquid was then poured into open wounds on his penis where he had been cut. He was frequently threatened with rape, electrocution and death.”

Whatever your ideological bent is, or whatever your views on "American exceptionalism" may be, this is not humane. I would highly recommend reading both the article above as well as the New York Times piece. This is what is being done in your name and in blatant opposition to the laws under which we the citizenry live.

I can only further echo what those, far more gifted in the written word, have said before. Torture is abhorrent because it removes the individuals volition. Think of the most vile thing you can, and then imagine that you were tortured until you allocuted to that thing. Professing a culpability that you know is untrue. That was only said, to stop the dripping of the water, or to allow you finally sleep, or to warm up for just a minute, or to not mutilate your genitals, or to not have routine body cavity searches, or to not have to hold your arms up for one more minute, etc. Because that is what torture does, it becomes more about ending the torment then about the answer given.

I understand that we live in world of dangerous people. But I also understand that along with all the benifits of liberty and freedom, it will and always does, require sacrifices of its people. Sometimes that price is paid in blood, and others it standing up for the rights of those who can not do so on their own. More importantly embracing the sort of rhetoric proffered by those who see no merit in investigations ensures that there are two different legal systems. One for the common people and one (a far more lenient, far less probing) for our elites.

If it is indeed a new day, then it is time for us to hold our leaders as accountable as they would hold us.

-Cheers

p.s. For those that were wondering what I was talking about last night, when I was going on about the harder then a diamond here is the link.