Democrats could become complicit participants in blessing torture should they elect not to use their newly-gained power and hold accountable the government officials who authorized and carried out the Bush Administration’s illegal and immoral enhanced interrogation techniques (torture).
It seems that when a political group has the power to correct such base policies as torture and consciously decides not to do so then they are committing the equivalence of silence on the issue; and the Latin maxim qui tacet consentit comes into play.
Below the fold, we can examine new developments in the U.S. government’s policy to torture people and the implications of continuation of that illegal and immoral policy.
Presently, the Washington Consensus (i.e., the Washington politicians, the political pundits, and the various, Kafkaesque satraps of the government who support torture as acceptable government policy) is in a full-throated debate over the effectiveness of torture. On the other hand, there is a thunderous silence from all but a few Washington Consensus-types on the legality and morality of torture.
The question of whether we committed torture or not has been answered in the positive; and the issue of whether we knew that we were committing torture has been answered in the affirmative as well. A passage from the Washington Post article, "In 2002, Military Agency Warned Against 'Torture' " illustrates the premeditated nature of the Bush Administration's policy on torture.
The military agency that provided advice on harsh interrogation techniques for use against terrorism suspects referred to the application of extreme duress as "torture" in a July 2002 document sent to the Pentagon's chief lawyer and warned that it would produce "unreliable information." Peter Finn and Joby Warrick, Washington Post online, 2009 April 25.
Equally, the aforementioned article cites the military agency's debunking of the notion of getting reliable information from tortured individuals.
So, we committed torture in order to get what we knew would be unreliable information. For what other reason did we commit torture?
An additional reason for committing torture was provided in a McClatchy news article, "Report: Abusive tactics used to seek Iraq-al Qaida link" and a passage (boldfaced emphasis added) from the article is included below.
The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist. Jonathan S. Landay, McClatchy Newspaper
So, we used lies about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and the "link" between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al Qaeda to "justify" our illegal and immoral war in Iraq. Even a person suffering from political obtuseness can now see the national house of deception which our political leaders have constructed; a house that they now furnish with unanswered legal and moral questions about United States' policy to torture people.
Why are the questions on torture’s legality and morality essentially ignored? Perhaps to get the answers to the questions would require an investigation of the whole loathsome matter of U.S. government sanctioned torture.
Various news agencies have reported that we punished Japanese officials for acts of torture (including water-boarding) that they committed during World War II. We condemned the North Vietnamese's torture of Americans held as prisoners of war at the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison. Conversely, we sell our national soul to the enhanced-interrogation-techniques devil so that we can torture the people we believe have information that will justify our illegal and immoral war in Iraq.
It seems that the only moral way out of our nation's present predicament regarding our torture of people is to conduct a transparent and thorough investigation of United States policy on torture. Quickly, we must get on with investigating this despicable matter. An investigation of United States' policy to torture people is not just a look backwards, but is a moral statement as to what kind of nation we wish to have going forward.
I look forward to helping our political leaders correct the tack of our nation's ship to a course that excludes torturing people. It is very easy to slip from torturing foreigners to torturing Americans. Please remember the USA Patriot Act and Protect America Act; acts that facilitated expansive government spying on American citizens - possibly in violation of the United States Constitution.