The background for my thoughts on this is that I believe that the actions of my country over the past several years have been despicable, and that releasing the torture photos will help make that point clear. I’m not talking about making the point clear to people outside of the United States – the outside world pretty much knows what we’ve been up to. Rather, I’m talking about making the point clear to the American people – many who just don’t want to think about it.
Given that background, here are the reasons why I believe it is crucially important to our nation that the torture photos be released:
Reasons why the torture photos must be released JusticeIf horrendous crimes have been committed, then justice needs to be served in order to uphold the rule of law. If we don’t do that, then we will have failed to set an example for those who will be tempted to commit similar crimes in the future. Having set (or continued) a precedent that such crimes can be committed with impunity, they will be much more likely to recur.
Some say that we already know what has happened. That is true for some Americans, and not so much for others. There is a great deal of denial going on among our people. A picture is worth a thousand words. Several pictures may be worth several thousand words. Let those who continue to claim that we don’t torture continue to do so after the pictures come out. I suspect that they will have a much more difficult time of it, and may even give up the effort altogether.
Preservation of democracyOne of the predominant requirements of democracy is government transparency. If a nation’s people don’t know what their government has done or is doing, then they have no basis for evaluating their government or making decisions about what needs to be changed.
Because of the atrocities committed by our government over the past several years, we as a nation now have some momentous decisions to make. In addition to our need to uphold the rule of law, we probably need to consider systemic changes in our system of government to make sure that these things are much less likely to happen in the future.
It is probably not be enough simply to say, “We have laws against torture, what more do we need?” Well, one example of what we may need is to throw off the attitude that allows a U.S. President to simply repeat the magic words “national security” as an excuse for holding secrets from the American people. We probably need a process that would make it MUCH more difficult for presidents to successfully invoke that magic phrase.
Without as full an accounting of what happened as is possible to give us, we will be that much less prepared to take the steps we need to get our country back on track.
HumilityOne of the greatest shortcomings of our nation is humility.
This article lists and summarizes well over a hundred U.S. foreign military interventions since 1890. It’s not just that we so frequently forcefully intervene, covertly or overtly, in the affairs of other nations, but that our people have been conditioned to accept these things as our birthright. So conditioned are we to accepting our right to do these things that those who publicly question that attitude are pilloried as “unpatriotic”.
Bob Altemeyer, in his book “
The Authoritarians”, discusses how the authoritarian mind works to facilitate this kind of attitude. Talking about their approach to dealing with guilt (or, rather,
potential guilt), he says:
They have been to the River Jordan and had all their sins washed away, often on a weekly basis just like doing the laundry. But this very likely contributes to self-righteousness, and let’s remember that self-righteousness appears to be the major releaser of authoritarian aggression…
They are Teflon-coated when it comes to guilt. They are blind to themselves, ethnocentric and prejudiced, and as closed-minded as they are narrow-minded. They can be woefully uninformed about things they oppose, but they prefer ignorance and want to make others become as ignorant as they.
Indeed, self-righteousness is a major releaser of authoritarian aggression. As long as people can convince themselves that they – and their country – are always in the right, they will feel little hesitation in carrying out whatever aggression suits them at the moment.
Well, let the torture pictures be plastered all over the Internet and all over the corporate news media (which may be compelled to give them some attention). Then let these authoritarians try to maintain their ignorance and their innocence. Let them continue to justify those actions in the name of God.
MoralityLiving a moral life – whether we are talking about an individual or a nation – requires that we make an effort to recognize when we do wrong, and then make amends for it. Altemeyer discusses how normal people respond
constructively to guilt:
Their major ways of handling guilt were to discuss the immoral act with those who may have suffered and make it up to them, or to talk with a friend about what they had done. Whatever they tried, it did not remove most of the guilt; their responses to the “How completely forgiven (do you feel)?” question averaged less than 3 (less than ‘moderately’ less guilty). But the residual guilt may help them avoid doing the same thing again…
One of the frequently used excuses for not releasing the photos is that doing so would endanger our troops. I don’t agree with that, but let’s think of the implications of that excuse. If we believe that releasing evidence of bad or immoral things that our country did would endanger our troops, that means that we are worried that our enemies would be inclined to take revenge against us for doing those things, by reciprocating. In other words we are worried that in so reciprocating, they would do things to us that they wouldn’t otherwise do. And that in turn is an implicit admission that they are more moral than us. In other words, if they’re so terrible – as we repeatedly tell the world – then why would they have to wait for evidence of our atrocities against them before they committed atrocities against us?
We as a nation have done great wrongs. Though our country led in the development of the United Nations,
whose primary purpose was to maintain international peace and prevent stronger nations from committing atrocities against weaker ones, we now have taken it upon ourselves to repudiate the system that was set up to accomplish that – not so much in words as by our actions. The only constructive way of dealing with that – to get us as a nation back on the track to morality – is to honestly acknowledge to the world what we did and actively seek to make amends for it.
Excuses for not releasing the photosPresident Obama, in
explaining his reversal on the release of the photos, said that “disclosing the photos would have ‘a chilling effect’ on future attempts to investigate detainee abuse.” That is not comprehensible to me. How can making secret evidence un-secret have a chilling effect on investigating the situation that the secret evidence pertains to?
But the more
widely quoted excuse for not releasing the photos is that they would “further inflame anti-American opinion and endanger U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
I have two major problems with that excuse. First of all, it’s very difficult to see how releasing the photos would do that. The outside world already has a pretty good idea of what we’ve done. To the extent that they
don’t know, they are sure to imagine the worst as long as we continue to hide the evidence. Releasing the photos could only serve to confirm what they already know or strongly suspect; or alternatively, it could show that what we did isn’t quite as bad as some imagined. In either case, it’s difficult to see how releasing the photos would put our troops in more danger than they’re already in.
Secondly, even if there was a small increase in risk as a result of our releasing the photos, our troops all accepted a certain amount of risk by volunteering to join our military. They volunteered to put themselves at risk in order to preserve democracy for their country. Accepting an increase in risk associated with our government admitting what we’ve done would go much further towards preserving democracy in our country than participating in a war of aggression. I don’t mean to sound cold-hearted about this. But the risks that our troops endure are far more the result of our leaders who threw them into an unnecessary war than they would be to any small increase in risk as a result of our coming clean about what our leaders have done. If our current leaders don’t want to subject our troops to an increase in risk, then great! Let those who wish to come home do so. Better yet, let them
all come home as soon as possible. That would be a much more effective way of keeping them safe than continuing to deny our misdeeds.
Holocaust deniersHolocaust denial has incurred a very bad reputation throughout the world, as well as in our own country. There is a very good reason for that. Denying that terrible things happened is an invitation to facilitate their repetition. The Germans learned that lesson. So well did they learn it that they
passed a law making Nazi Holocaust denial illegal, with a maximum sentence of five years in prison for denying doing that.
I’m not saying that the crimes committed by the Bush administration compare in severity or magnitude with the crimes committed by the Nazis. But whatever crimes were committed by the Bush administration, the reasons that we shouldn’t cover them up are similar to the reasons why people shouldn’t deny the Nazi Holocaust. If what we did wasn’t as bad as some people think, as many right wingers claim, then let’s prove it by releasing the photos. And if what we did
was as bad as some of us fear, then let’s come clean with ourselves and the world and show them anyhow, as an initial step towards redemption.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
