As you no doubt have heard by now, President Obama announced last week his decision to block the release of photos depicting the use of “harsh interrogation techniques” (read: “torture”) on detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq. This decision marks a strange reversal of the Pentagon’s previous decision to release the photos (after the ACLU prevailed against them in a case at the Federal District Court level). Obama’s justification for this reversal was that he worried the dozen-or-so photos– which, according to him, “are not particularly sensational, but the conduct did not conform with the Army manual”– could possibly “further inflame anti-American opinion.” This marks my first MAJOR disappointment with our new Commander-in-Chief, and it is a betrayal that I find absolutely inexcusable. Mr. President, this is not a change I can believe in. This is not even a change.
As regular readers of this blog know, I wrote my dissertation on truth commissions, which are the political bodies set up to aid governments transitioning from periods of internal conflict, civil war, dictatorship, and/or gross violations of human rights to a (hopefully) more peaceful and democratic social, civic and political order. One of the principal (and principled) assumptions of truth commissions is that errors of the past cannot be overcome unless the full truth of that past is brought to light and, furthermore, that polities and peoples are almost certainly destined to repeat the same errors without such disclosure. In the words of Maya Angelou: “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage need not be lived again.” The aim of truth commissions is to make possible the courage to face the ugly truth of the past, as well as to facilitate the sorts of changes that guard against its repetition. What history has shown us, again and again, is that silence about injustice is tantamount to complicity with injustice. As injustices are concealed, they are both enabled and perpetuated. My many years of research on this topic has convinced me that Senator Leahy’s call for a truth commission to address the injustices committed and allowed by our previous administration is a necessary and indispensible tool for our nation’s progress away from such illegal and immoral politics-as-usual.
President Obama’s decision to squash the release of the new torture photos is not only disappointing, but also seriously alarming. It signals a gross misunderstanding of the nature of our problem and a willing blindness to the steps necessary for its remedy. Obama’s claim that the release of these photos might “inflame anti-American opinion” simply fails to recognize that much (if not most) of the “anti-American sentiment” of which he speaks is directed against our nation’s exercise of a presumed (but merely presumptive) unilateral control over what counts as politically and morally significant truths. It seems relatively safe to assume that the sorts of people who have “anti-American opinions” already know that America tortures, and has repeatedly justified these activities, and I doubt that more photos that testify to this (because we already have plenty) are going to “inflame” those opinions any more than they already are. So, who are the putative opiners whose sentiments we are trying to assuage by withholding these photos? Most certainly, it’s NOT “Muslim extremists” or “terrorists” or any others who might already harbor resentment about our government’s clandestine activities. It must be, then, the people who don’t know, or who still don’t believe, that America tortures…
And those are precisely the people whose sentiments need to be inflamed.
In his State of the Union Address just a couple of months ago, President Obama said: “I can stand here today and say without exception or equivocation that the United States does not torture.” Ten years ago, that statement would have been a given… but, unfortunately, it was a contestable, and thus required, avowal on the part of our new President. What better way to confirm that things have changed, that things are different, that we really do believe (again, to use President Obama’s words) that “living our values doesn’t make us weaker, it makes us stronger and safer” than to demonstate that we are unashamed to acknowledge our shame? We ought to be ashamed that torture was justified in our name. We ought to disavow that practice and its justification. We ought to lay bare all of the ugly truths, in all the words and images that we have at our disposal, as testimony to the sincerity of our commitment to “change.”
Or, in all honesty, we ought not to pretend that we have learned anything at all from the past that has so regrettably stained our reputation and our conscience.
