Still Living With Jack Bauer in a Terrified New American World

None of the High Government Officials Responsible for Activities That Amount to War Crimes Has Been Held Accountable; Nor Have Any of the Actual CIA Torturers

When it comes to torture, President Obama has argued that “nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past,” but this is simply not true. One thing that could be gained would be a public consensus that the United States should never again engage in torture. Another might be agreement that officials who are likely guilty of war crimes should not be allowed to act with impunity and then left free to spend their post-government years writing memoirs or painting themselves bathing.  

Retired Major General Antonio Taguba, whose military career was cut short by his report on U.S. abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, wrote in the preface to a June 2008 report by Physicians for Human Rights, “After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

Years later, with a different administration in its second term, this question has been answered.  They will not.  Nor will the actual CIA torturers, since the Obama Justice Department has dismissed all cases involving their brutal interrogations, even two that resulted in the deaths of prisoners.

This is not to say that no one has been sent to prison because of the CIA’s torture programs. Former CIA analyst John Kariakou is presently serving 30 months in federal prison for revealing the name of a covert CIA operative, while blowing the whistle on the Agency’s torture operations. From his prison cell, he has called for a special prosecutor to bring the architects of the torture program to justice.

Living in a Cowardly New World

The post-9/11 United States is no brave new world, but a terrified one. We are constantly reminded of the dangers we face and encouraged to believe that torture will keep us safe. Americans have evidently seen just enough — between revelations of fact and fictional representations — to become habituated to the idea that torture is a necessary cost of safety. Indeed, polls show that Americans are more supportive of using torture today than they were at the height of the “war on terror.”

In these years, “safety” and “security” have become primary national concerns. It’s almost as if we believe that if enough data is collected, enough “really bad guys” are tortured into giving up “actionable intelligence,” we ourselves will never die. There is a word for people whose first concern is always for their own safety and who will therefore permit anything to be done in their name as long as it keeps them secure. Such people are sometimes called cowards.

If this terrified new worldview holds, and if the structure for a torture system remains in place and unpunished, the next time fear rises, the torture will begin anew.

Rebecca Gordon is the author of Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States (Oxford University Press). She teaches in the philosophy department at the University of San Francisco. She has also spent several decades working in a variety of national and international movements for peace and justice, and is a member of the War Times/Tiempo de Guerras collective. You can contact her through the Mainstreaming Torture website.

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