Slate's Jacob Weisberg claims we're all complicit in torture. BS!

[ProSense]

Our Tacit Approval of Torture

We need to come to terms with not just who did what, but our collective complicity with their decisions.

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Unlike the Japanese internment, waterboarding was ordered and served up in secret. But it, too, was America's policy—not just Dick Cheney's. Congress was informed about what was happening and raised no objection. The public knew, too. By 2003, if you didn't understand that the United States was inflicting torture upon those deemed enemy combatants, you weren't paying much attention. This is part of what makes applying a criminal-justice model to those most directly responsible such a bad idea. The issue we need to come to terms with is not just who in the Bush administration did what, but our collective complicity in their decision.

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Well before the nation reelected George W. Bush in 2004, the country's best investigative reporters had unearthed the salient aspects of his torture policy: in December 2002, Dana Priest and Barton Gellman revealed on the front page of The Washington Post that American interrogators were employing "stress and duress" techniques as well as shipping prisoners to places like Egypt, where even fewer rules applied. "Each of the current national security officials interviewed for this article defended the use of violence against captives as just and necessary," the reporters wrote. "They expressed confidence that the American public would back their view."

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As with Japanese internment, Bush's torture policy wasn't seriously challenged by the other branches of government while it was still in effect. Though House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claims she wasn't told about it, evidence suggests she and other senior members of the intelligence committees were briefed extensively on the use of waterboarding in fall 2002. One official quoted in The Washington Post said, "The attitude was, 'We don't care what you do to those guys as long as you get the information you need to protect the American people'." In September 2006, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, which shielded U.S. interrogators from potential prosecution for torture. The Senate rejected an amendment introduced by Ted Kennedy that would have defined waterboarding as a war crime. In 2008 Democrats finally had the guts to pass legislation limiting interrogation techniques to those covered in the Army Field Manual. Bush vetoed the bill and there was no override.

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President Obama has done the most important thing: reversing Bush's policy and declaring, as he did last week, that torture was unequivocally wrong. What we need now is a public airing through congressional hearings and perhaps an independent commission, an idea that the White House is resisting. Pursuing criminal charges would be too hard politically and too easy morally. Prosecuting Bush and his men won't absolve the rest of us for what we let them do.

Utter bullshit.