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Why Not A 'Full, Frank And Just Acknowledgment'?

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  • Why Not A 'Full, Frank And Just Acknowledgment'?

    WHY NOT A 'FULL, FRANK AND JUST ACKNOWLEDGMENT'?

    by: Marie Cocco

    The Oregonian
    April 28, 2009 Tuesday
    Portland, Oregon

    TORTURE AND ACCOUNTABILITY H is interest, President Barack Obama
    says, is "the achievement of a full, frank and just acknowledgment
    of the facts."

    His topic was the delicate question of what to call the slaughter of
    1.5 million ethnic Armenians at the hands of Turkey during World War
    I and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, a festering historical sore no
    American president can genuinely hope to heal.

    But Obama's professed desire for a complete and just accounting
    raises the question: If it's good for the Armenians, why isn't
    it good for Americans? Why can't we also have a "full, frank and
    just acknowledgment" of the facts surrounding torture and other
    moral horrors that were carried out in our name during the Bush
    administration's global war on terror?

    History demands it.

    Obama doesn't want to bog his administration's ambitious agenda down
    in partisan recriminations over past practices. Fair enough. But it
    does not follow that no official inquiry should be held. There is
    more to find out, because much information is still being kept secret
    --sometimes by the very perpetrators of the shameful practices, who
    press on in the courts, for example, to attain what they hope will
    be a permanent shroud.

    A copious report by the Democratic staff of the House Judiciary
    Committee, released last month, provides a chilling compendium of
    what we know, and what we don't.

    We do not officially know whether the "enhanced interrogation tactics"
    used by the Bush administration were in fact criminal violations of
    federal statutes prohibiting torture and war crimes. We do not know
    what laws may have been broken through the use of "extraordinary
    rendition." This was the practice of sweeping people up and
    transferring them to secret CIA "black sites" or to countries --Egypt,
    Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Pakistan, for example --where torture is
    believed to be practiced.

    We do not know how many people were jailed and interrogated in
    this system. Estimates range from 100 to 150 to "several thousand
    renditions of terror suspects," the judiciary report says. We don't
    know how a program of "rendition" that was occasionally used in prior
    administrations to deliver a suspect to face prosecution in a country
    where he was wanted on criminal charges metastasized into a global
    sweep of those who were detained for interrogation. We do not know
    what happened to "ghost" detainees held by the U.S. in Iraqi prisons
    --prisoners who were never registered or identified and, for all we
    know, disappeared.

    We do not know the full extent of the warrantless wiretapping of
    Americans that continues, in some form, to this day.

    Sweeping this all aside in the interest of moving on isn't a mark of
    how mature our political system is. It is an indictment of it.

    It acknowledges that we cannot withstand the clamor of television
    talking heads --that somehow the distraction of their empty chatter
    is as weighty in its consequence as the heinous acts that smear the
    nation's reputation. Do we really want to surrender to the purveyors
    of partisan hot air? This is the ultimate capitulation. It shows
    us to be so weak that we really should worry about how this act of
    cowardice is perceived around the world.

    We have a contemporary model for how to conduct a politically
    sensitive inquiry properly, without undue theatrics and with respect
    for classified information. It is the 9/11 commission, a sober and
    thorough panel that explored systemic failures that preceded the
    terrorist attacks and put to rest false claims --including the Bush
    administration's contention that Saddam Hussein somehow was behind
    it. The panel operated outside the partisan hothouse of Congress,
    yet drew freely on the expertise of those inside and outside the
    government. Its final report became a best-seller, not because it
    inflamed political passion but because it was unconventionally --and
    thus, believably --dispassionate.

    The Bush administration opposed the creation of the 9/11 commission,
    then resisted with much force many of the panel's requests for
    information. In the end, determined lobbying by victims' families and
    their acumen at airing their demands in the media forced officialdom
    to create the panel, and helped the commission surmount obstacles
    that were placed in its way.

    Now we have no tearful widows or orphaned children to plead on
    television for a just accounting. But how we handle the grievances
    of the voiceless and confront our own misdeeds is yet another measure
    of our character. And yes, the whole world is watching.
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