One thing that President Obama campaigned on was a commitment to transparency. He was unequivocal about that; his performance in office has not been. He has adopted the Bush usage of the state secrets privilege to squelch court cases around, and thus to protect, illegal wiretapping. He has maintained the Bush position to the British government that if a court there does release information about a tortured detainee, then we would not share intelligence as freely with them as in the past. And now he is pushing Senators Graham and Lieberman and other legislators to make illegal the release of photos of prisoners who were tortured by the Bush administration, photos whose release the ACLU has already won in court.
Today there was a vote in the House instructing the conferees on the War Supplemental to reinstate the Graham-Lieberman amendment, the House version of which was stripped out a few days ago. Sure, “instructing” is non-binding. Nevertheless I was disappointed to learn that my representative, Robert Wexler, was one of 95 Democrats who voted in favor and that the measure passed. The following is the letter I wrote him this evening:
I just learned that you voted to instruct conferees on the Iraq War Supplemental to restore the amendment that would prohibit disclosure of photos of the torture of detainees by the Bush administration. That was the wrong thing to do.
We the American people need those materials to come out, all of them, if we are to have a chance to prevent that kind of thing from happening again. We need to make it impossible for people to think that they can do those things and have them never see the light of day. I, for one, do not want to be “protected” by people who think they have a right or obligation to torture. They are not protecting me; they are endangering me.
I do not for a second believe that the goal of the Graham-Lieberman amendment is to prevent Muslims from having access to the photos. Not by a long shot. Muslims know what we did to them. Certainly those we tortured and everyone within at least three or four degrees of separation knows what we did to them. That is already a great many people. No, they already know, and if they were going to be radicalized, they already are, and not by photos but by what we did to them.
No, the goal is not to prevent Muslims from seeing those photos. The goal is to prevent Americans from seeing them in order to preserve the government’s option to torture. Let me say that again: the goal of that amendment is to preserve a space for torture. Keeping Americans as ignorant as possible about what we did is essential to that objective.
Suppressing those photos and any other such materials is wrong, against Geneva, and unAmerican. We must have full disclosure now in order to establish the credible threat of full disclosure going forward. Why? Because the force and fear of public knowledge of such inhumanity is the only thing that stands a chance of preventing the repetition of that heinous part of our history. The mere illegality of torture, specious made-to-order legal rationalizations aside, did not prevent it. No, we must have full disclosure now and in the future. It is the only way to ensure that such actions are not repeated. If they are then repeated in the certain knowledge that they will see the light of day, at least we will know what we have become, and it will not be Americans.
Cross-posted at BlueBroward.org.