Griper Blade: Panetta in Defense of Crime

There aren't many issues on which the Obama administration has been as disappointing as on the issue of the crimes of the previous administration. The ruling fiction coming from the White House is that it's time to move on, as if the law only applies to things that are happening right now, as if you can only arrest and charge a criminal if you catch them in the act. If they manage to commit a crime and not be arrested on the spot, then that means they've gotten away with it.

It's gotten so bad that when Attorney General Eric Holder announced last month that he might appoint a special prosecutor to investigate torture, it was big, big news. "Nation's Top Cop May Investigate Crime" really shouldn't be a big headline. At least, not in a country that applies the law evenly, regardless of how powerful the criminal is or was. Torture is one of the most heinous crimes that a state can commit and it's astounding that there's any controversy about prosecuting it. If you need evidence of just how badly this sort of crime can harm the nation committing it, there you go -- respect for law among the country's most powerful has been shattered by the action. And respect for law among the country's most powerful must be restored.

Part of the problem is that Washington insiders live in a separate reality, where what is right is determined by what is good politics and where what is possible is determined by the number of insiders an action would hurt. Entrenched thinking pervades agencies like the FBI and the CIA and the battlecry of "change" doesn't reach into those trenches. On the issue of torture, the argument is made that it would harm people's abilities to do their jobs. If you start prosecuting for torture, interrogators would be overly careful, for fear of prosecution. If this is true, you wonder how intelligence gathering operated before the Bush administration showed up and torture was clearly illegal. It could only have been by tremendous luck that the United States was never destroyed by her enemies, because interrogators must've been terrified into paralysis about doing their jobs... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]