Although an Obama supporter, I am not one of the “Kool-Aid Clan” that drank the juice and now sees stars coming out of his nether regions wherever he walks.   No, President Obama is a man, a human, and a politician, prone to the same influences that all others are.   It is for this reason that I am disappointed on his stance on several issues, namely warrantless wiretapping, abortion, and the prosecution (or lack thereof) of the acts of torture that the United States has committed in its “war on terror”.

The fact is, we now have on record leaked memos from the Bush administration authorizing extreme measures to be used in extracting information, quotes from Dick Cheney about what sort of tactics were used on detainees, and probably the most damning evidence of all, the International Committee of the Red Cross report citing that the methods used on US prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay and other “black sites” around the world were, in fact, nothing but torture.

The ICRC is the independent, non-political group assigned to police nations for violations of the Geneva Conventions, the set of international treaties that determine world-wide rules for waging war and the treatment of such people as prisoners of war.     Essentially, the GCs were convened to hold all countries to some minimum standards of decorum when in conflict (personally, I think it’s hilarious, because why not just outlaw war?  That is another discussion, however.)

The ICRC report is quite easy to read and accessible, written in plain, understandable English — I’ll even post it here as a link:

ICRC Report on Torture

I urge you to read it, or at least some of it; the summaries are darn good bits, and reading even one of the types of torture used will set your hair on end.  The accounts of the acts done by CIA operatives and other personnel are…not pretty, but something we should all be aware of, because our country endorsed and used these on other living human beings.

These reports are never meant to be seen by the public; as you can read, it was addressed to the CIA and is marked confidential.   Thus the reporters have held nothing back in their evaluation of the true situation and what it means in moral and ethical terms.   It makes no bones about their evaluation of the treatment of the top 14 “high value” detainees, saying, “…the ICRC clearly considers that the allegations of the fourteen include descriptions of treatment and interrogation techniques — singly or in combination — that amounted to torture and/or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”    This is nothing less than a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions by the United States government.

And I’d like something to be done about it.

So far, Spain is on the ball and has already started working on prosecuting six Bush-administration officials for their involvement in authorizing torture tactics, but why should we wait for other countries to do our dirty work?    You can be assured that Europe has far less to lose if they choose to prosecute the people involved in this than we do, but don’t we, the people, care enough to deal with this ourselves?  Does the new administration not know what has happened and that they have a responsibility to find those guilty and to prosecute them for their crimes?

Of course they do — they’re just avoiding it because it’ll burn up HUGE amounts of political capital, especially with the far Right.     There’s always been a bit of a precedent to avoid such mole-whackings of the previous administration, even to the point of pardoning the whole messy system (hellooooo, Nixon?).    I do not think that we should let this one slide into the past without even a whimper, however.    So far, Attorney General Eric Holder has been rather mute on the issue, dodging the central question of torture prosecutions, despite saying during his confirmation that he did not agree with the tactics and that it should be punished.     And fair enough, he’s just getting started, but…we’re waiting.   And we don’t want to be kept waiting forever.

Change is not always easy.    It oftentimes pisses people off and makes enemies.    Change can be hard, stressful, cumbersome.    You might end up making just as big of a mess from performing change as you started with, or even worse.   But on this note, we cannot let falter — the United States, the American people, are not torturers and we do not stand for that sort of behavior.    We must redeem ourselves in the world’s eyes as well as our own, for how can we face our children and say we did the right thing if we sweep this under the rug?

It will be hard and difficult and painful, but it must be done.    Please, President Obama, prosecute the perpetrators of torture.    And please, American public, support the effort.    We can do better, and we should.   Pay the bill and bring those to bear for their heinous acts — please.