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.

"History will not judge this kindly"

The internets are a-buzz over a big report from ABC News that reveals that people at the highest levels of the Bush administration gave detailed instructions to the CIA as to which methods of torture could be used against detainees:

In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News....

Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects -- whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding....

The advisers were members of the National Security Council's Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.

At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

What's more, even after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke and the Justice Department withdrew what had been the legal sanction for the "enhanced interrogation techniques" (i.e., torture), Rice went ahead and approved the techniques anyway for a suspect being held in Asia:

A year later, amidst the outcry over unrelated abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the controversial 2002 legal memo, which gave formal legal authorization for the CIA interrogation program of the top al Qaeda suspects, leaked to the press. A new senior official in the Justice Department, Jack Goldsmith, withdrew the legal memo -- the Golden Shield -- that authorized the program.

But the CIA had captured a new al Qaeda suspect in Asia. Sources said CIA officials that summer returned to the Principals Committee for approval to continue using certain "enhanced interrogation techniques."

Then-National Security Advisor Rice, sources said, was decisive. Despite growing policy concerns -- shared by Powell -- that the program was harming the image of the United States abroad, sources say she did not back down, telling the CIA: "This is your baby. Go do it."

There is absolutely nothing in the ideology or history of American conservatism or the Republican Party that condones the unilateral use of torture by the executive branch of the government. Republicans and Democrats should therefore feel free to unite in their condemnation of the Bush administration's excesses in a way that transcends the partisan squabbles of the moment and re-asserts the American people's basic sense of decency and humanity.