http://www.stltoday.com/blogzone/the-platform/published-editorials/2009/04/independent-commission-needed-on-torture-memos/The “I was only following orders” defense is as inadmissible now as it was in Nuremberg in 1946, these groups say. How do you waterboard a suspect 83 times in one month — as was done to Zubaydah — without concluding you’ve probably gone over the top?
From the right came former Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey and former CIA Director Michael Hayden. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, they argued that the effect of Mr. Obama’s decisions will be “to invite the kind of institutional timidity and fear of recrimination that weakened intelligence gathering in the past.”
If it was Mr. Obama’s hope to lay the torture issue to rest, he will be disappointed. Too many issues remain, most fundamentally, did the “enhanced interrogation techniques” keep us safe — as Vice President Dick Cheney and others insist — or were they the product of simplistic minds that had seen too many episodes of “24”? Who was driving these decisions?
Mr. Obama has resisted appointing an independent commission to explore these questions. He should reconsider. Only a full airing of the issue can tell us how we strayed so far from our fundamental values, and more important, how we can do it right the next time.
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