Obama won’t prosecute CIA torturers, but he doesn’t have to

‘One tortured, always tortured’, said a French resistance figure who survived capture by the Nazi occupiers and knew what he was talking about. He meant that the experience left him irrevocably changed in ways no therapy, no rest, no return to normal life could ever repair.

I think the principle works in reverse, too, that once having tortured, one cannot return to the pre-torture state of grace. That goes for nations too, so we should now prepare for the long, troubling, discomfiting descent into the realization that as a society, we wasted no time in trading in our moral compass for the promise of safety and authorized, passively for the most part but no less definitively, Bush’s goons to torture their way through Bagram and Guantánamo in search of the mythical ticking bombs.


The release today of most of the hidden, but hardly ‘secret’, memos prepared by Bush’s thug lawyers to authorize torture gives us another piece of the puzzle, and the announcement that the Obama Administration will not pursue the criminal acts contemplated therein for prosecution will disappoint many.

I am among them, but having been through all this before, I know it’s far from the end of the story. The Chilean state had much more power to immunize its gorilla squads and cover up their sadistic work. But there’s just something about torture—it doesn’t go away even when the victims’ bodies have been dropped into oblivion at sea.

I have no idea exactly how the symbolic corpse of the tortured will bob all bloated and mutilated back into the national consciousness. But I haven’t the slightest doubt that it will.

Maybe there will be criminal prosecutions in foreign lands, a grand opportunity for Limbaugh to denounce dastardly Europeans. Perhaps Congress will dare to investigate. Perhaps repentant underlings will publish their memoirs. Or as occurs to this day in Chile, maybe the victims will post flyers on telephone poles pointing out that a former torturer lives at such-and-such an address and that his wife is president of the PTA. Maybe it will all come out on Facebook.

But it will occur in due course. I am young enough that I will gleefully trumpet my I-Told-You-So’s from the rooftops when it does.