A Change of Heart?

Barack Obama has been urging Americans to look forward and not waste any time looking in the rear view mirror. In most regards, that is a sound policy. But not when it involves the use of torture.

In the days before the inauguration, I argued that it was important to investigate the activities of the Bush–Cheney administration, if only so the current administration — and the ones to come — would know the mistakes that were made and how to avoid repeating them.

Today, 13 weeks after Obama took office, the president "left open the door to creating a bipartisan commission that would investigate the Bush administration's use of harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects," report Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Peter Baker and Scott Shane in the New York Times, "and he did not rule out taking action against the lawyers who fashioned the legal guidelines for the interrogations."

That's encouraging news for those of us who regard the torture techniques that were used in the previous administration as immoral, indecent and inhumane. There is no justification for torture, particularly the heinous practice of "waterboarding," which is believed to lead to physical and psychological problems that last for months, if not years.

The Bush administration justified it as the only way to get the information that was sought. But that's the problem, isn't it? Torture has never been shown to elicit reliable information. If it succeeds in getting any information from the person who is being tortured, it is apt to be the information that is being sought — whether that information is accurate or not.

In other words, the person who is being tortured will tell his/her interrogators what they want to hear, simply to get them to stop. How reliable is that?

Even if defenders of the policy can satisfactorily demonstrate that these techniques contributed to the prevention of an attack on a major American city in the months and years following the Sept. 11 attacks, does that justify the actions? (And, incidentally, no one has been able to prove that is the case.) Doesn't engaging in torture bring us down to the level of those we imagine ourselves to be far above?

Now, lest anyone get too excited about the possibility of a probe into the policies of the previous administration, Stolberg, Baker and Shane point out that Obama "said he is 'not suggesting' that a commission be established.

"But in response to questions from reporters in the Oval Office, he said, 'if and when there needs to be a further accounting,' he hoped that Congress would examine ways to obtain one 'in a bipartisan fashion,' from people who are independent and therefore can build credibility with the public."

The president has offered the Nazi defense for the benefit of operatives who engaged in torture during the Bush years — "we were just following orders." No doubt there are some operatives, just as there were some Nazis, who followed orders even though they disagreed with those orders.

But there are also those Americans — the ones at the Abu Ghraib prison, for example — who clearly enjoyed torturing and humiliating their prisoners, whether they got any useful information from them or not.

Just as there were Nazis who enjoyed torturing and killing Jews during World War II — and probably would have done so even without the sanction of their government.

If those Americans were "just following orders," let them document that. Give us tangible evidence.

But we do not need to give them a blanket excuse to help them avoid prosecution, especially if — as it was with the Abu Ghraib guards — it can be shown through available evidence that they enjoyed inflicting torture on their charges.

Even more than any of his predecessors, the first black American president should be aware of — and sensitive to — the rule of law and the necessity for America to support and defend human rights.