POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK TIMES
Far.
My God, it is only sixty-odd years ago that we declared absolutely that following orders is not an excuse when the orders violated basic laws and rights.
The entire Bush/Cheney era is black hole of abuse of authority, murder, and torture.
No one who made these things happen should feel free. We read of Hitler’s willing helpers, did we not?
There are always excuses for abuse and abusive orders. The CIA is not unique in that. In the mind of every tyrant - from Stalin to Pinochet - there were strong and fearful reasons for their acts.
The only way we can be protected from such people is to hold them accountable in each and every instance that we get the opportunity to do so, which itself is rare enough. So few abusers ever are held accountable in the world at large that it makes almost every ethical and moral lesson we learned as children a pleasant fantasy: the evil do prosper, and bad men regularly step over the bodies of good men.
How easy it is - Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld showed the entire world - to take hold of a society of laws and defined rights and complex international obligations and just ignore them all, paying only lip service while carrying on in the darkness in contempt of every principle of decency.
Many observers in the world, including myself, actually believe the United States has tipped over an edge or threshold into a new equilibrium and cannot reclaim any prestige and honor it had.
The promise of that charming, intelligent man, Obama, already is badly faded. The vast forces around him cannot be easily be changed and, perhaps, cannot be changed at all. This is a test of that reality.
Democratic societies are not exempt from the terrible abuse of democratic values: it is a silly myth to believe so.
The U.S. with high-sounding words on paper went a couple of centuries with human bondage and vast abuse. The Confederacy was a democracy for those with the franchise. South Africa under apartheid remained a democratic state for those with franchise. France, inflicting its horrors in Algeria, was a democratic state. I could go on: there is a long list.
Dedication to human rights and democratic values requires America to root out the people who made these ugly acts possible and punish them.
Otherwise, I genuinely believe American democracy is on the wane and the country well on its way to being Eisenhower's Military-Industrial Complex, ruling a vast empire with abuse and state terror from an elite establishment of military and intelligence and the driving fists of industry.
Power is power, no matter how granted. And Lord Acton's dictum remains one of the most accurate observations of human society ever uttered.
