The grinding mills

I see that some on-line groups are agitating—and attracting broad support—for a special prosecutor to look into the Bush cabal’s torture and wiretapping crimes. They say Obama should assign the chore to Patrick Fitzgerald, and others insist that Attorney-General-designate Eric Holder should be asked the same question that current A-G Mukasey dodged: Is waterboarding torture?

We may recall that Mukasey’s appointment went through despite his failure to answer and weasel-y indirect support for torture, thanks to Democratic senators Charles Schumer and Dianne Feinstein who did what Democrats love best: cut loathesome deals with Republicans for individual gain. This should be a warning sign to those who anticipate that Truth, Justice and the American Way will now triumph given that the Dems control Washington’s commanding heights.

If my past experience is any guide, the opposition critics of these practices now nearing the halls of power will proceed to do the absolute minimum to bring the criminals to justice. While a few low-ranking patsies may get it in the neck, the Obama team’s priorities are all about winning their legislative programs, for which they’ll need cooperation from the ancien regime. So expect some window-dressing gestures while the political operatives hold their breaths and hope the whole seamy topic disappears.

Unfortunately for them, it won’t. As I’ve said repeatedly here (and it’s nothing original, either), torture lingers in the air like the aroma of a dead rat under the floorboards. People, some people anyway, are morally outraged by it, and they’re not likely to let Obama, Biden and the incoming crew off the hook. Judges also tend to resuscitate the issue because year after year, decade after decade, they see the awful consequences of the practices in the persons of those who come before them seeking redress or, for that matter, en route to prison.

You’d be surprised how this whack-a-mole issue pops up no matter what forces are deployed to bury it. Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet issued a notorious amnesty in 1981 covering all political crimes committed since the 1973 coup d’etat, a blatant attempt to cover up his own. But some human rights attorneys argued that the amnesty could not be generic, that is, it could only be applied once each crime was fully investigated and blame individually assigned, not awarded in advance to a vague, undefined group.

That didn’t get too far with the pinochetista judges who dominated the country’s bench in the early post-regime years, and many of us thought the truth would never come out. But the ingenious lawyers weren’t finished: they argued that the crime of ‘disappearance’, that is, snatching individuals off the street and carrying them to secret dungeons, was an ongoing crime. So while outright murder of political opponents might be amnestied under the 1981 law, those thousands of disappearances were violations of law being committed continuously into the present.

This argument, surprisingly, held. The military authorities either had to admit to murder and seek application of the amnesty law or face criminal inquiries.

That meant investigations continued, accompanied by the Rettig and Valech Commissions that dug into the sordid facts of kidnapping, torture and murder, with the country’s political and economic elite kicking and screaming all the way. More than 20 years after the plebiscite that began to dismantle the dictatorship, officials and civilian enforcers still trudge wearily through the nation’s courts to face the long-delayed music.

Meanwhile, the lovely practice of ‘funao’ accompanies those snakes who managed to hide their identities as torturers and fascist muscle. ‘Funao’ is a kind of outing in which activists expose the nazis in their midst with leaflets on telephone poles or sudden guerrilla theatre eruptions at unexpected venues. I witnessed one during a 2003 sexology conference in Santiago.

In short, although President Obama is unlikely to put the torturers in the hotseat, they’re equally unlikely to escape it. They will pay.