David Cole responds to the Ahmed Ghailani verdict in New York last week, “Obama’s Torture Problem”:
The most likely reason that Ghailani was acquitted of the other charges was that the judge barred the prosecution from putting on its chief witness—who would have testified that he sold Ghailani the TNT used to blow up the embassy in Tanzania—because the government learned of that witness only through statements obtained from Ghailani while he was being tortured in a CIA black site. Ghailani reportedly also confessed to his role in the bombings during interrogations at the black site and at Guantánamo, but that confession also could not be used because of the CIA’s illegal tactics. The same result would have been obtained in a military trial, as involuntary confessions are inadmissible in both forums. The problem with the Ghailani case, in other words, was not the civilian versus military character of the courtroom, but the fact that the Bush administration tortured him.
The Ghailani verdict is a kind of accountability. We are paying for the torture we chose to inflict. But it’s deeply unsatisfactory. The torturers—President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, and Justice Department lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee, to name just a few—are not held responsible. They remain free to travel the lecture circuit and publish books bragging about their crimes. It is the families of victims of the embassy bombings who must pay the price—in foregone justice—for the crimes the Bush administration perpetrated in its “war on terror.”
It turns out that looking forward, not back, will never resolve the torture legacy. Until we own up to and provide a reckoning for the moral and criminal wrongs committed by officials at the very highest levels of the former administration, the fact that we tortured will continue to fester—and cause problems for its successor. The prevailing view in Washington seems to be that we should move on, but such wrongs cannot be forgotten.
