The NY Times calls for the investigation of Team Cheney Torture Awesome Force GO! which should be major news. It’s not, and in fact the depressing part is that it’s close to meaningless.
The question everyone will want answered, of course, is: Who should be held accountable? That will depend on what an investigation finds, and as hard as it is to imagine Mr. Obama having the political courage to order a new investigation, it is harder to imagine a criminal probe of the actions of a former president.
But any credible investigation should include former Vice President Dick Cheney; Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington; the former C.I.A. director George Tenet; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers who drafted what became known as the torture memos. There are many more names that could be considered, including Jose Rodriguez Jr., the C.I.A. official who ordered the destruction of the videotapes; the psychologists who devised the torture regimen; and the C.I.A. employees who carried out that regimen.
That’s great and all, but as I said last week:
So yeah, solid majorities in favor of “enhanced interrogation techniques” because “they work”, and “got us intelligence we could not have otherwise gotten”, and that the Senate Democrats should never have released the damn report at all.
Also, 47% found the report unfair to the CIA, and 57% think there should be no charges against those responsible (only 1 in 3 want to see prosecution.) Hell, even 46% of self-identified liberals and 46% of registered Democrats believe the CIA actions were justified.
Not going to happen. Obama doesn’t want to go after who did it, Holder doesn’t want to investigate those behind it, the CIA certainly won’t stand for it, the GOP will never allow it, and most of all, the American public could not care less about prosecuting torture. Hell, we think it’s great because you never know when you’re going to have to take a Black & Decker to the temple of some dirty foreign brown guy to save American lives from a digital countdown clock, just like the teevee machine shows us over and over again.
We don’t want to know, and we don’t care to know, and we never will. All Team Cheney has to say is “If your family was facing a terrorist bomb, and you had the guy who could stop the clock tied to a chair, how far would you go to save your loved ones?” Every time we look into his world of darkness we’ve seen only ourselves.
So eventually we’ll stop looking altogether.