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President Obama has said that "those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice... will not be subject to prosecution".
I find myself with a mixed reaction to this. I applaud the administration's statements that torture will no longer be tolerated: it's about time that the United States returned to obeying our own and international laws and stopped being a rogue nation. Yet... the "get out of jail free" card bothers me. We have been both twisting and ignoring law in supporting torture methods, and now no one will be held accountable for those actions? That seems wrong.
Yet... I can see Obama's point here. People were acting on advice from legal counsel who claimed that our law supports these techniques. It seems fair not to prosecute those who acted in response to such advice; who acted, as it were, in good faith that their actions were indeed legal. My hope, though, is that in not prosecuting the agents themselves, the administration will go after those higher-up in the chain of command who drafted and created these memos, who authorized the torture methods, who told those agents "Go on -- we've got your backs."
It's one thing to say that from now on we're going to follow the laws that are in place. It's another to fail to punish those who chose to ignore the law in the first place, and who in doing so tarnished and despoiled the reputation of our country.
I find myself with a mixed reaction to this. I applaud the administration's statements that torture will no longer be tolerated: it's about time that the United States returned to obeying our own and international laws and stopped being a rogue nation. Yet... the "get out of jail free" card bothers me. We have been both twisting and ignoring law in supporting torture methods, and now no one will be held accountable for those actions? That seems wrong.
Yet... I can see Obama's point here. People were acting on advice from legal counsel who claimed that our law supports these techniques. It seems fair not to prosecute those who acted in response to such advice; who acted, as it were, in good faith that their actions were indeed legal. My hope, though, is that in not prosecuting the agents themselves, the administration will go after those higher-up in the chain of command who drafted and created these memos, who authorized the torture methods, who told those agents "Go on -- we've got your backs."
It's one thing to say that from now on we're going to follow the laws that are in place. It's another to fail to punish those who chose to ignore the law in the first place, and who in doing so tarnished and despoiled the reputation of our country.
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Part of the way you can instill that in people is by heavily publicizing the notion that there will be repercussions for people who don't take personal responsibility for their actions.
This certainly would put people in the terrible position of "Rock, meet hard place," having to choose between their career (and by extension, their role or purpose in life), and their conscience. And so we should hold up the example of things such as McCarthyism, which eventually collapsed precisely because people started saying, "Go ahead and kill my career, but you are still an asshole and I will not knuckle under to you."