Have Republicans Made Peace With Torture?

Have Republicans Made Peace With Torture?

Jonathan Bernstein — Read time: 3 minutes

Recent hearings suggest they still haven’t grappled with the reality of when went on in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It’s a crime.

Photographer: Anna Moneymaker/Getty

April 12, 2022, 8:30 PM GMT+9

Before the hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson slip from memory now that she’s been confirmed to the Supreme Court, it’s worth noting that they marked a failure of one of President Barack Obama’s decisions when he was in office.

I’m talking about his decision to ignore that the previous administration had used torture during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It came up when Republican senators attacked Jackson for having noted in a court filing that the U.S. had committed war crimes. In fact, Senator John Cornyn claimed that Jackson had called President George W. Bush a war criminal, which wasn’t exactly what she said — as

several fact checkers explained. What she did say, however, was that some U.S. actions did count as war crimes, and of course that’s exactly what torture is. The incredulous reaction of the Republicans demonstrated that they either refuse to believe that this conduct actually happened, or refuse to believe that torture is a war crime — or perhaps both.

Which means that it’s unfortunately still possible that it will happen again. In fact, President Donald Trump described himself as

supporting torture, before he was dissuaded by Defense Secretary James Mattis and seemed to lose interest in the subject. But if Republican politicians are willing to support it, odds are that it will happen again.

The worst of this practice had ended by the time Obama took office, and he moved quickly to eliminate the rest. But when it came to reckoning with what had happened, Obama had several choices. He could’ve pushed for prosecutions — if not for everyone up and down the chain of command, at least for someone. He could’ve appointed a commission to study the issue and come back with recommendations. My own suggestion was that he offer blanket pardons to everyone involved on the grounds that the Sept. 11 attacks had driven people to make poor choices. With any luck, at least some high-ranking Bush administration officials might’ve accepted the pardon, and that buy-in could’ve made a commission truly bipartisan. But even if they all rejected the pardons, it would have given Obama the high ground to talk about the issue without any threat of prosecuting the previous administration, which is always a tricky problem.

Instead, Obama

said he would “look forward as opposed to looking backwards” and basically ducked the topic for eight years. That wasn’t necessarily the wrong choice. It offered Republicans a de facto deal: We’ll all ignore that it happened, as long as we agree that it should not happen again. Had Obama done more, it would’ve risked further polarizing the nation around the issue, with Republicans digging in and eventually making torture the standard party position.

Cornyn and other Republican senators broke that deal (which, to be sure, was always tacit at best) by acting outraged that anyone could ever suggest that Bush — and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld — had ever sanctioned torture. But of course they did. That Republicans should now act as if it was beyond the pale for anyone to say what plainly happened? To try to score political points over it? It’s not as bad as actively supporting a new round of war crimes, but it’s far too close to it. After all, one of the reasons to support torture is that it’s the demagogue’s friend; irresponsible politicians can accuse those willing to abide by international law (and

traditional U.S. norms and practices) of being insufficiently tough.

Again, that’s not quite what Cornyn was up to. But it’s close.