No Walkbacks on Torture

By Cernig

Thank you, Glenn Greenwald, for holding Dem feet to the fire today. They have to understand that approval for torture - approval for anything more "enhanced" than the Army Field Manual says is allowed - is a red line. Cross it, and they will not only lose the support of progressives, in droves, but they will also hamstring Obama's administration in its attempt to rehabilitate America's prestige and integrity, America as seen by the wider world.

Make no mistake on this - Obama is America's last chance to prove it has any moral authority remaining. If he fails to do so the world, including America's allies, will conclude it is simply the largest bully and bullies deserve no loyalty. That way lies the worst possible multi-polar world and massive long-term harm to both America's national interests and Western cohesion.

Comments

[The Heretik]

Bully for us. Yay.

[Don SinFalta]

It's optimistic to think that Obama will do much to improve America's moral standing. It seems unlikely that Obama will pursue any sort of consequences for the perpetrators of torture, mostly to avoid getting bogged down in a big fight with with the not-insignificant faction in this country that supports torture and other probable war crimes of the Bush administration. So America will remain a country in which torture and related violations of human rights are within the acceptable range of policy options, no matter how moral a policy Obama pursues as president. The next administration that is attracted to the dark side will be armed with the Bush precedents and will charge right ahead, with the full approval of a significant fraction of the country. Absent any real accountability for the perpetrators of the Bush torture policies, there will be little basis for any claim that America is a country that does not torture or that our moral standing is anything but what we have demonstrated it to be.