Sanitizing History Instead of Reckoning With It
No, the United States during the Bush years was not a totalitarian regime, nor is it one now. But it adopted detention and torture methods and literally sublet locations previously associated only with totalitarian regimes, including prison complexes and torture chambers previously used by Soviets (in Afghanistan) or their Cold War client states (in Poland and Romania).
Reckoning with history is an American specialty. It's what enabled this country to own up to past atrocities, emerging stronger and better for it. Sanitizing history is the first rule of un-free nations. When government represses its own sinister past and gets away with it, the damage to a nation's character is more lasting than any terrorist act.
Recycling Bush
Obama doesn't need the reminder. "History is often tragic, but unresolved, it can be a heavy weight," he told the Turkish parliament just a few weeks ago. "Each country must work through its past. And reckoning with the past can help us seize a better future." Well? Obama isn't dealing with America's recent past. He's recycling it. He banished the obnoxious "war on terror" phrase. But he's escalating the war, especially in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with results so far no less disastrous than his predecessor's, to civilians especially.
He disclosed the Bush administration's legal machinations that signed off on a regime of torture and illegal detention. But he's stuck with those illegal detentions, fighting against court access for prisoners in American prisons in Afghanistan (where the former Soviet dungeon at Bagram, now under American control, is undergoing a $65 million renovation). He's restarting the military-tribunal charade at Guantanamo (with a cosmetic touch-up of due process). And he's endorsing rendition -- sending prisoners to other countries where they may be tortured. He's even embraced the "state secrets" doctrine that bars any lawsuit that could disclose whatever he decides is a state secret.
Abu Ghraib Backtrack
Obama proved with those secret-memo disclosures that the numerous anecdotes of sadistic and mostly pointless interrogations had understated the extent of the brutality. He confirmed that the president, the vice president, the attorney general and the defense secretary had explicitly approved the torture regime. Then he reassured the torturers that he wasn't interested in prosecutions. He promised more disclosures, then stopped. (Pro Publica, the nonprofit news site, has the long list of still-secret memos). Finally, he reversed himself on releasing a stash of torture photos from Abu Ghraib.
That decision is Obama's most cynical to date, especially as he brandished for an excuse the emotionally potent but false pretense of soldiers' safety. Protecting servicemen matters, beginning with respect for the Geneva Conventions. Using them to deny the extent to which the United States violated those conventions puts Obama in league with his predecessor's duplicity.
Fearing a Truth Commission?
Obama's entire campaign was driven by repudiation of the Bush years. He's not reversing himself on the Abu Ghraib photos to protect soldiers, but because the momentum is building for a truth commission over the Bush years, and for possible prosecutions of those who led it -- not the minions who followed its orders. The Abu Ghraib photographs in their totality may demolish Obama's argument about "looking forward," not back. As they should.
Just 10 Americans were prosecuted for Abu Ghraib abuses, all of them low-ranking. Only one, Charles Graner, a corporal, remains in prison. A witch hunt for all the real culprits would be foolish. But the Bush administration that endorsed targeted assassinations would understand targeted prosecutions in the course of a full reckoning. Instead, Obama is Photoshopping history to the delusion of his moral high ground. And the Bush years' most willing executioners are cheering.
The Boneyards of Norilsk
It's not as if suppressing evidence will make it go away. Sooner or later the photographs will be published. Other revelations will come to light, too, in an embarrassing drip rather than a systematic accounting--like Robert Draper's article in GQ about Donald Rumsfeld's Bible-belted memos to George Bush in the run-up to war on Iraq.
Why mimic Soviet amnesia, even in the smallest ways? In Baghdad, Abu Ghraib has been restored, refurbished, renewed--not as a hospital or a human rights center, but as yet another prison, a third incarnation of misplaced penal pride since its inception in 1970 as Saddam Hussein's Bastille (the second was under American occupation).
To this day, just one of the Soviet gulag’s camps, notorious Perm-36, was approximately restored (in 1997) as a memorial. But it’s expensive and difficult to visit. A more ghoulish memorial blanches the landscape around the Arctic city of Norilsk every June, when bones of slave-laborers from Stalinist-era mass graves surface in the thaw. That’s how the skeletons in Russia’s closet tumble out: unintentionally and namelessly.
Obama is ensuring that the skeletons of the Bush years will be similarly half-buried.
