Most kindergartners know that telling the truth is the “right thing to do.” For adults, telling the truth to ourselves, about ourselves, is one of the marks of moral maturity. In the political realm, with few incentives to admit mistakes and fix them, the chance to learn from history gets lost in a blur of good media strategy and the self-serving memoirs of retired policymakers.
Perhaps only something even more precious than good public relations must be at stake to force us to take a hard look in the mirror, to view our own history honestly and to learn from it.
One such case rests before the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee right now. Maine’s retiring Sen. Olympia Snowe, a member of that committee, is in a unique position not only to do the right thing but also to seal her reputation in history as one of those invaluable Mainers who stood up at the right time and insisted that the truth be told and decency restored, at long last.
For the past three years, the intelligence committee has thoroughly investigated CIA interrogation practices from 2001 to 2008. They have collected the truth about what was done to prisoners in the war on terror in America’s name – in our names.
The truth now resides in a 6,000-page report. The executive summary, alone, is rumored to run to 500 pages. It will take the CIA a year or more to redact the report to protect legitimate interests, such as references to agents in the field and other sources. But first, this month, the committee must vote on whether to adopt the report and – crucially — whether to submit it for declassification and public release.
The mirror we, as a nation, need to look in is now held in very few hands. It is still cloudy with conjecture. It is marred by partial evidence that human beings were tortured by the United States, a signer of the 1994 United Nations Convention Against Torture, which states: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” It’s time to clear the fog and look into the mirror directly.
Torture is illegal. Torture, by the testimony of many interrogation experts, is ineffectual. Torture is against the founding values of our nation and against the common standards of morality of every major world religion. The National Religious Campaign Against Torture and groups like the Maine Council of Churches have been calling for an investigation into U.S. interrogation practices for many years, since shortly after the world first saw the photos of the Abu Ghraib atrocities.
That thorough investigation is now complete, but it has no value to citizens, future policymakers or history unless the report sees the light of day. Snowe can make that happen as her long service as an independent-minded leader in the Senate draws to a close.
A strong, mature person accepts responsibility for mistakes and takes action to fix them. So does a strong, mature nation, one that other nations look to for leadership in peacemaking and human rights. Telling the truth to ourselves and others is a basic moral good. It is vital for accountable, democratic government. If we fail in this, we have nothing to help us see the way forward but the dim and failing light of wishful thinking, hoping that some unseen “they” must know what they’re doing, and we can just look away.
“We the people” are ultimately responsible for what is done in our name. Our job as citizens doesn’t end with voting. It continues by holding our government up to the scrutiny of open, public judgment. And that begins with getting our own story straight, with ourselves and with history.
With one vote to adopt and release the intelligence committee report, Snowe can help us all to do just that.
The Rev. Jill Saxby is executive director of the Maine Council of Churches.
Snowe has nothing to lose. She may as well see that the truth comes out before she goes.
Or she can be true to herself and NOT cave to heavy-handed, politically-correct, “suggestions” from self-righteous liberals.
If the USA tortured people, then we as a nation have a right to know, and a right to know who did it.
Declaring certain topics off-limits is the definition of political correctness. Burying this report would qualify. If a letter to the editor from a reverend qualifies as heavy-handed, your skin must be real thin. Is it self-righteous now to want to expose torture? Thank you Rev. Saxby.
An entirely appropriate thing for the Senator to do. I have my doubts people in her position, though, trust the American public to handle the truth of torture as official state policy as it was under the Bush admin. It is as it stands officially unconfirmed, obvious but so poorly defined, obfuscated and muddied under legal feints and obscure justifications, an open faced admission that, yes, US intelligence, military personnel, and private contracts in the hire of the US government committed systematic torture repeatedly on many detainees, many of whom were entirely innocent of any crime, and that some of those tortures resulted in the deaths of those interrogated… might just be too much for the public to absorb. (That WAS the purpose of the Military Commissions Act, to redefine torture in order to water it down to a more palatable taste for the American public, as well as to insulate from prosecution those that devised the torture regime and executed the program. See the link below for an excellent discussion about this.) Disclosing that truth amid such a divided populace might be thought of as too divisive, too destructive to a fragile American society unable to cope with such revelations.
After all, in NYC in events that started the ball rolling on so much of what led to the torture regime, a 110 story building within TEN MINUTES of being struck by an airplane around the 88th floor has been described by firefighters in the hallways and stairwells from the ground floor up and throughout the building, workers in the subbasements, hundreds of fleeing office workers, as erupting with explosions NONE of the people involved could comprehend. Some of these were described by fire captains as synchronized blasts, as secondary devices, by journalists on national television as massive and multiple, by ex-military police officers as exactly like the types of explosions they were trained to experience in their military training. All within the first 10 to 20 minutes after a single aircraft caused fires on several floors 1000 feet above the street. Multiple subbasement explosions that a dozen or more people experienced and have talked about, big enough to knock over walls, to completely destroy a metal working shop and a 50 ton press, to register on seismic graphs across the Hudson River in New Jersey, to shake the ground of videographers in Brooklyn. And the official obfuscating non-explanation (none has ever been given to explain any of this happening within the first 10 to 20 minutes after impact) is jet fuel exploded… BS.
There are official secrets that may never see the light of day because they are just too despicable, the people likely responsible just too monsterous for us to claim as our own, that these secrets must be kept to keep up the official line that America is the greatest nation in the world… We could be… but, truth be told, we aren’t. We are like any other empire with its bloody dungeons and political intrigues…
http://balkin.blogspot.com/2006/10/when-lawyers-are-war-criminals.html
Citations from the official documents and reports from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Oral History of the New York City Fire Department, the RJ Lee environmental study, and the USGS, as well as the archived footage from national network broadcasts regarding events that led to the collapse of the South Tower on September 11 available on request.