Truth. No Reconciliation. 0

As my three or four regular readers would guess, I disagree with Mr. Obama’s decision not to reveal the pictures of torture as conducted by the Previous Federal Administration.

Secrecy is the enabler of lies.

Josh Marshall sums up the latest:

We now have two big developments on the torture front that may allow the whole torture issue to take on a life of its own and frustrate President Obama’s attempts to close the door on the issue. First, as you’ve seen, is Nancy Pelosi’s claim this morning that the CIA is lying about what it told members of the Democratic opposition in the early part of this decade. (The CIA. Lie? It is to gasp.–ed.)

(snip)

Next you have a flurry of claims that a key motive behind the push to torture was to elicit ‘confessions’ about an alliance between Saddam Hussein and al Qaida, which was of course the key predicate for the invasion of Iraq.

I have no way of knowing whether the reason for the the torture was to support the lies that sold the Iraq War. It is a commentary on the immorality of the proponents of that war that, at this point, no one other than the truest true wingnut believer would accept that as feasible, for it is consistent with the duplicity and venality of the Previous Federal Administration.

Now comes Clive Stafford Smith in the Guardian:

No matter how you dress it up, the question on the table is whether the Obama administration should continue to cover–up evidence of the criminal offence of torture, committed by US personnel. It is a truly remarkable notion that evidence of crimes should be suppressed because it might provoke anger around the world.

I suspect that the issue is not truly “anger around the world,” but rather embarrassment around Washington, D. C.

The damage around the world has been done. The anger already is.

However bad those photographs are, not revealing them will make them be visualized as worse than they probably actually are.

It is time to debride the wound and end the gangrene.