I want the Attorney General to investigate all aspects of this illegal policy; specifically, I would want to know the Bush’s administrations’ motivation for the endorsement of these crimes.  Perhaps, the reason are more nefarious then suspected.  I think that the Obama administration owes the American people legal clarity on this issue. People should be prosecuted including Cheney if he is the architect of criminal activity.  If Nancy Pelosi or other democrats knew of torture and did not do anything to stop it, then they are culpable by silence and weakness.  They should lose their jobs.   

And if you can’t go after the actual torturers for political reasons, then any other prosecutions — of the people who ordered the torture, for example, or the people who wrote the legal memos justifying the torture — will seem politicized because the law is being applied selectively. In letting the actual torturers off the hook, we’ve already abandoned the idea that the law will be applied strictly.

The problem with making an argument that torture is absolutely wrong on moral grounds is that it gives the impression that we are constrained by our morality in ways that give the terrorist an advantage. You could also say it is absolutely immoral to kill innocent civilians — but our military does that all the time, calling it “collateral damage.” I can easily imagine someone arguing that if we refused to take any military action that might lead to civilian deaths, we would quickly be defeated by an enemy that was willing to kill civilians. And when it comes to torture, anyone who takes an absolute position on the morality of torture faces absurd hypotheticals: What if a nuclear bomb were about to destroy New York City and the man who knew how to defuse the bomb was tied to a chair? Is it really moral to let an entire city be annihilated just to avoid commiting the “sin” of torture? Most people are unwilling to take an absolute position on torture because they can’t accept the hypothetical implications.

That’s why the question of whether torture works is so important. And that’s why I believe it is so important to focus on the fact that Dick Cheney wasn’t ordering torture to stop a ticking time bomb. He was torturing someone in order to obtain information that could be used to advance his own political agenda. This is less like the ticking time-bomb scenario, and more like the Watergate break-in.

If this ends up being a debate between those who say torture is wrong under all circumstances and those who say torture may be acceptable in some circumstances, then I’m afraid the pro-torture folks are in the majority. IF this ends up being a debate about what the Bush Administration actually did and whether it was acceptable, I think the anti-torture folks are in the majority.

Just today I listened to a broadcast of NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show in which a former Bush Administration Official claimed without any equivocation that torture is the sole reason America was able to prevent a major terrorist attack against Los Angeles. Were it not for torture, he said, hundreds if not thousands of Americans would have been killed. If I could save hundreds of lives by inflicting pain on a terrorist, I’d have a hard time justifying any decision other than to go forward with the torture.

This debate is like the debate over the death penalty — while some argue that killing a defenseless person is simply immoral, and others argue that the death penalty is too expensive and yeilds no clear benefits in terms of deterence, the most persuasive argument against the death penalty seems to be that we simply cannot rely on our legal process to effectively decide when a person should die. Evidence of wrongly-convicted death row inmates makes the point that our legal system isn’t sufficient to legitimize the taking of a life. Similarly, if it turns out that Cheney did have people tortured not to save the country from a terrorist attack but merely to provide political justification for a war — this should be the basis for a whole new line of argument: that we cannot trust any human being to make the decision to go ahead with torture.

I can’t say I’m disappointed with Obama’s political judgment that he shouldn’t be the one calling for investigations into the Bush Administration’s torture program — but I agree with Paul Krugman that we need to prosecute those responsible in order to reclaim our national soul.