A ‘truth commission’ on torture?

Like many Americans, Atlanta attorney John Chandler doesn’t want to see low-level functionaries prosecuted for torturing detainees.

“I have no interest in the government prosecuting people who were obeying orders,” he said. “I think the government should prosecute those who were giving orders.”

Chandler, a partner at King & Spalding, knows something about the subject of torture because he has represented Guantanamo Bay detainees who have been subjected to horrendous beatings and other forms of physical abuse as well as psychological abuse.

But Chandler knows that the American public probably doesn’t have any patience for prosecuting George Bush, Dick Cheney or John Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer who wrote convoluted legal justifications for torture. So, the next best thing, Chandler says, might be something like a truth commission, which can get to the bottom of what exactly happened and why.

“The American people and the world deserve to know what happened and why,” Chandler, a Vietnam veteran, said yesterday.

Chandler has a more generous view of what went on after 9/11 than I do. He believes that Americans showed very little outrage about continuing reports of torture during the Bush administration because they simply couldn’t believe it was going on.

“The American people really have a hard time believing the US government would torture people,” he said. “We’ve been leaders in the world in condemning others for torturing. I think we’ve really had a hard time believing our government would do it. I think most people believe the president when he says, we don’t torture.

How many times did George W. Bush say, ‘We don’t torture.’ It’s still hard to believe that somebody is going to dissemble to that degree,” he said.

Unlike Chandler, I think many Americans believed that we were beating, waterboarding and otherwise torturing detainees but found that conduct perfectly acceptable. Never mind that we would condemn that conduct if Americans were subjected to it by say, Iran or North Korea. When we do it, it’s okay.