The Betrayal of Our Moral Standards

The rant lady is back again! But how can we not look at what's happening in our country lately?

The past week we have been forced to take one more long look at what has happened to our moral ideas and standards as the issue of torture has made its’ way into the spotlight again. I realize and understand that President Obama wants to move ahead and deal with the serious challenges that we have facing us right now – an economic crisis, a health care crisis, an environmental crisis. So, isn’t revisiting the abuses of the last eight years, no matter how bad they were, a luxury we can’t afford? This was NYT Op-Ed columnist, Paul Krugman’s question in his column on Friday.

I have to admit that I don’t want to look at or for any more problems in this country today, but we are more than a collection of policies. And as Krugman said, we are, or at least we used to be, a nation of moral ideals. We haven’t always done a perfect job upholding those ideals, but never before have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for. Former President George Bush declared that, “This government does not torture people.” But it did and the entire world knows it. And it was done not to prevent another terrorist attack, it was done to justify a war the Bush Government was determined to wage on Iraq.

I have read articles not only by Krugman, but by former FBI supervisory special agent, Ali Soufan and Nicholas Kristof and Frank Rich also NYT Op-Ed columnists. The general consensus is that we need to investigate the Bush Administration’s abuses. The only way we can regain our moral compass, not just for the sake of our position in the world, but for the sake of our own national conscience, is to investigate how that happened, and, if necessary, to prosecute those responsible.

No one would be calling Tim Geithner away from his efforts to rescue the economy. Or Orszag, the budget director, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to reform health care, or Chu, the energy secretary, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to limit climate change. Even the president needn’t, and according to Krugman, shouldn’t be involved. All that the president needs do is let the Justice Department do its job.

Like Krugman, I think America is capable of uncovering the truth and enforcing the law even while it goes about its other business. Still, there are many people who believe that revisiting the abuses of the Bush years would undermine the political consensus the president needs to pursue his agenda. Unfortunately, the answer to that is – what political consensus? There are still a significant number of people in our political life who stand on the side of the torturers, but these are the same people who have been relentless in their efforts to block the President’s attempt to deal with our economic crisis and will be equally relentless in their opposition when he endeavors to deal with health care and climate change. President Obama cannot lose their good will, because they never offered any in the first place.

I know there are lots of people in this country who just don’t want an ugly scene and I, too, feel that perhaps President Obama, who prefers visions of uplift to confrontation, is one of those, but the ugliness is already there – none of us can make it go away by pretending. And I suspect there are a lot of others that would prefer not to revisit those years because they don’t want to be reminded of their own sins of omission.

But the fact is that officials in the Bush administration instituted torture as a policy, misled the nation into a war they wanted to fight and, probably, tortured people in the attempt to extract “confessions” that would justify that war. And during the march to war, most of the political and media establishment looked the other way.

It’s hard not to be cynical when some of the people who should have spoken out against what was happening, but didn’t, now declare that we should forget the whole era – for the sake of the country, of course.

I’m afraid that I totally agree with Krugman that what we really should do for the sake of the country is have investigations both of torture and of the march to war. These investigations should, where appropriate, be followed by prosecutions, not out of vindictiveness, but because this is – I ‘d like to think – a nation of laws.

Krugman finishes by saying, that we need to do this for the sake of our future. For this isn’t about looking backward, indeed it is about looking forward – because it’s about reclaiming America’s soul.