The question is no longer whether or not it is torture. Mark Danner wrote an exposé on the torture of prisoners in the New York Review of Books (Part 1, Part 2). No matter what people say, water-boarding (and one suspect was water-boarded 180+ times! - it's sick, really) is torture. So, now Dick Cheney and his ilk don't even bother with the pretense that it wasn't torture, but rather argue that it was worth it. That we needed to torture in order to extract information to protect our nation.
So, as Danner points out, the next step is to figure out whether or not we got the information we needed.
According to this article in TIME magazine, we did get important information when we tortured suspects, but the torture was unnecessary . . . we could have gotten the same information without using torture. And the writer of the article is Robert Baer, a former CIA man, so you'd think he'd know what he was talking about.
So, where does that leave us? Well, for one, it vindicates everything that had been said before hand - everything that Bush denied. Secondly, it shows how much of a moral fraud Dick Cheney and all his supporters are. Thirdly, it raises serious questions about what America stands for (that Obama is addressing, thank God). Fourthly, it presents the question: to prosecute or not to prosecute.
So far, Obama has been reluctant, and I understand that reluctance. We have had too much partisanship over the last 20 years or so. We need to start reforging a sense of what it means to be an American - a sense that is inclusive of many perspectives. But it is also important for us to draw some lines (othering, so to speak). If there is one line that I think it is important to draw, fearless reader, it is the line that torture is not something that represents America. I think we need to have some sort of investigation and public shaming, if not outright prosecution. To do nothing would only abet those that would save America by destroying America.
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