In the overblown, self-regarding prose that has become his trademark, Obama lauds himself and his administration for their fealty to the “rule of law” in releasing the memos. But of course, the “rule of law” also dictates that those who have planned, ordered and committed torture be prosecuted. The law has no special dispensation for crimes that might be “too disturbing” to prosecute. And so his ringing conclusion — “we have taken steps to ensure that the actions described within them never take place again” — rings completely hollow. How will failing to prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes deter any future perpetrator in high office? The latter will know that their crimes will be “too disturbing” to prosecute — in much that same way that the biggest fraudsters on Wall Street today are “too big to fail,” and must be allowed to escape the consequences of their actions.
In the end, of course, it doesn’t matter. This story will be buried in a day, or less, just as all the other many, many stories about the American torture program have been buried, year after year after year. And even this story — as morally repulsive as it is — deals only with the tip of the iceberg of America’s global gulag. It refers only the CIA’s treatment of a very limited number of high-profile prisoners. Yet tens of thousands of people have passed through the belly of the gulag beast, where many have been tortured, held captive for years, even murdered. And not only is this still going on, but the Obama Administration is moving strenuously in court to drive these captives even deeper into limbo, asserting that no one who is plunged into the netherworld of America’s little Gitmos in Afghanistan has the slightest right to any tincture of legal redress — even if they had been kidnapped from the streets of some foreign city and “renditioned” to Afghanistan.
The old crimes are being written off; the new crimes keep going on.
