It’s been another bad week for the rule of law.
Last Wednesday, The New York Times revealed that the NSA has been overstepping its congressional mandate and intercepting phone calls and e-mails from American citizens.
According to The Times, this breach was “significant and systemic,” and Dianne Feinstein, the head of the Senate intelligence committee, plans to hold hearings to determine just how this happened.
The next day, the Obama administration released a number of memos from the Bush years detailing which interrogation methods could be used by the CIA on potential terror suspects. Among the practices: keeping a detainee awake for up to 11 days and placing a prisoner in a confined box with insects. That’s not to mention waterboarding, which our current Attorney General says is torture. According to the memos, one man was waterboarded 183 times.
Of course, this all comes on the heels of shocking revelations that have become so frequent as to be mundane. The Bush administration sent prisoners to countries not overly concerned with legal niceties so they could be questioned without the nuisance of the Geneva Conventions. Prisoners were transported to secret prisons overseas and held without charge, council, or trial. Men were sexually humiliated, doused in cold water, and subjected to all kinds of degradations that should shame a civilized people. In most instances, all of this was done without the American people knowing what was being perpetrated in their names.
President Barack Obama has already taken steps to remedy these injustices. But last week’s disclosures remind us of the terrible damage done to our most fundamental rights in this country– and that’s only what we know about so far.
Obama has said that he won’t prosecute anyone who used the interrogation methods authorized in the memos. He believes that it’s time to come together and move past these shameful episodes.
Obama is right. Going after people who were following the commands of their superiors won’t solve anything. And while some radicals are calling Bush and Cheney war criminals, it would set a scary precedent if American leaders were held criminally accountable for doing what they thought best for the American people.
But in looking forward we must not forget what came before. We need to know what happened. We need to atone for our sins. We need to do everything we can to return to the path of lawfulness and human decency that has sustained us for over two centuries.
Defenders of the harsh methods of the Bush administration argue that terrorists don’t deserve legal protection. After all, men who fly planes into buildings, women who strap bombs to themselves, don’t offer their victims anything so trifling as a lawyer and a courtroom.
This logic is tempting. I don’t think anyone who would murder thousands of innocent men and women deserve much protection, either. But it’s not about what they deserve; it’s about who we are and what we don’t do.
We don’t torture people. We don’t hold people without any safeguards to make sure they really deserve to be held. We don’t spy on our own citizens without a warrant. We choose to be better than that.
The war on terror is as much about ideas as it is about guns. We can pour hundreds of thousands of troops into deserts across the world. We can spend billions of dollars and shoot the most high tech weapons wherever we please. Odds are, no one will stop us. But that won’t be enough. This war won’t be won so long as there are 100 people alive in the world willing to do anything to hurt innocent people. As long as irrational hatred exists, so will terrorism.
The best way to stop the cycle of violence is to rise above it. That doesn’t mean roll over and accept defeat. America must protect itself. But it also must show the world-including its enemies-why freedom is better than oppression, peace better than war, hope better than fear.
Since our nation’s founding, a commitment to doing what is right, to honoring freedom and respecting the rule of law, has fed our national consciousness. People with little else in common were brought together around the ideals of liberty and decency that have come to characterize the American identity. We should remember our long tradition of goodness and come through this war with our conscience intact. When we do that, we will have won.
Nathaniel French is a sophomore theater studies and math double major. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].
