Cowardice at the New York Times

The New York Times editorializes that "top officials" in the Bush administration should be investigated for their role in implementing a torture program, with the possibility of bringing charges--however, it somehow stops short of saying that Cheney and Bush should be held accountable as well:

Now, a bipartisan report by the Senate Armed Services Committee has made what amounts to a strong case for bringing criminal charges against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; his legal counsel, William J. Haynes; and potentially other top officials, including the former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.

The report shows how actions by these men “led directly” to what happened at Abu Ghraib, in Afghanistan, in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in secret C.I.A. prisons.

It said these top officials, charged with defending the Constitution and America’s standing in the world, methodically introduced interrogation practices based on illegal tortures devised by Chinese agents during the Korean War.

It's all quite baffling. Why shouldn't Cheney and Bush be investigated along with Rumsfeld and other "top officials"? If the torture programs was somehow carried out without the knowledge or approval of the elected officials in charge, then an investigation should bear that out. And if the elected officials did approve the programs, then they should be held at least as accountable as their underlings, if not more so. It simply does not make sense to believe that we should consider bringing charges against officials as high ranking as the Secretary of Defense, and yet at the same time also believe that the President that Secretary served under should get a free pass.

Of course, the editorial doesn't explicitly state that Cheney and Bush should be exempt--but the omission is glaring. I imagine that there was quite a heated discussion amongst the editorial board about how high to set the target--whether it would be "top officials", or Rumsfeld, or all the way up to Bush. I imagine that they believed, in the end, that calling for the investigation of Bush and his possible arrest for war crimes would be going too far, banishing the paper to the "angry left" and polarizing a debate that can only succeeed if it remains unpolarized. Maybe they're right.

However, at the end of the day, the press isn't doing its job if it refuses to take risks in speaking truth to power when the stakes are highest. I understand that a newspaper can only be persuasive to a large number of people if it remains, by and large, comfortably within the mainstream. But what is the point of saving up all that "persuasion capital" if you don't spend it on something as important as holding an American president responsible for war crimes? Maybe Barack Obama cannot let himself be perceived as trying to take down the soon-to-be ex-President, but there is no reason why the New York Times should have any reticence.

By refusing to "go there", the NYT reinforces the conventional wisdom that to hold President Bush himself accountable for war crimes is outside the mainstream and not a view that Serious People hold. But this conventional wisdom will have to be overturned if America is to even begin to rectify the abuses that have been going on since September 11.