Eugene Robinson - Torture and the Law: Where 'Those Methods' Ultimately Lead

Post columnist Eugene Robinson, in Torture and the Law: Where 'Those Methods' Ultimately Lead, says that "once we learn the whole truth, the law will oblige us to act on it. ... I'm not sure it's possible to skirt the criminal implications of what we already know, let alone what we might find out in a full-scale 'truth commission' investigation with access to all relevant witnesses and documents."

He congratulates the Obama administration for being "straightforward and righteous" on the moral issue while being "far less definitive" on the legal question. He implies thereby that President Obama would like us now to "forgive but don't forget" the crimes of torture committed by CIA agents upon terrorists jailed abroad in 2002 and 2003.

This is Option Two in Michael Kinsley's column on the subject, Where This Buck Stops. Mr. Kinsley aptly points out that Americans who re-elected President Bush in 2004 already knew (or should have) about the waterboarding and other torture tactics when they voted that November.

Messrs. Robinson and Kinsley are liberals, but not just liberals are calling for justice in the matter of prosecuting those who authorized, justified, and carried out "enhanced interrogation" techniques. Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker, in Is It Torture?, says "the answer lies in what we want to be":

Few have put it more clearly than [Republican] South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who is also an Air Force colonel and senior instructor at the Air Force Judge Advocate General's School and has served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a 2006 Newsweek interview, Graham said: "Either we're going to use torture or we're not. And when you say, we won't use torture, unless we think we really, really need it [then] we're not a rule-of-law nation."

If we want to continue to call ourselves a nation that is subject to the rule of law, says Ms. Parker, then we must set aside the "darkly impassioned arguments" by which most of us (myself included) would be able to justify torture under certain special circumstances — say, to save the life of our child.

Rather, we must ultimately judge our actions in the same "cool light of day" by which, it is hoped, we devise our laws. Rationality must trump passion at the end of the day, and rationality says lawbreakers must be penalized, however noble their motivations.


P.S. For those who missed it, here is the Washington Post's recent coverage of the release by the Justice Department of the memos, dated from 2002 to 2005, by which the "enhanced interrogation techniques" were originally justified. And here is a 2008 story on how "two key architects of the Bush administration's controversial interrogation policies defended their legal positions" before a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee.