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“A people that values its privileges above its principles soon looses both.”

The United States Senate last week issued a bipartisan report laying responsibility for the policies that have promoted the torture of foreign nationals at the feet of top officials in the Bush administration.  That report states, flatly, that

“On February 7, 2002, President George W. Bush made a written determination that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment, did not apply to al Qaeda or Taliban detainees. Following the President’s determination, techniques such as waterboarding, nudity, and stress positions, used in SERE training to simulate tactics used by enemies that refuse to follow the Geneva Conventions, were authorized for use in interrogations of detainees in U.S. custody.”

All of a sudden, the United States, particularly the incoming Obama administration, is faced with the question of, Whence Now?

Where, formerly, this question lay in the backroom shadows of informal public discussion, the formal acknowledgement of war crimes by the senior legislative chamber has brought the issue into the full light of our legal system and can no longer be swept under the rug.

Although the report neither uses the actual word “torture,” nor does it ever state the United States committed “war crimes,” it places us on the horns of a dilemma – do we hold our leaders, and ourselves, to the same standards we have long imposed upon both the leaders and the peoples of other nations who have acted in a similar manner, or do we assert our imperial right as the world’s sole superpower and seek to place ourselves above The Law in the belief that we can do more good in the world if we do not carry the taint of transgressors?

Barack Obama has shown little interest in pursuing officials of the Bush administration for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” seeming to believe, instead, that such pursuit could turn into a partisan witch hunt that would further widen the divide between the Left and Right doing more harm than good at a time when the country desperately needs to come together if we are to solve the myriad of problems left us by the eight years of George W. Bush.

But if we whitewash criminal actions and refrain from holding the perpetrators of war crimes accountable, how can we possibly expect to regain our mantle of moral leadership?  If we fail to pursue with all appropriate vigor the transgressions of Bush, Cheney, et al, how can we ever hope to hold accountable those responsible for the atrocities of Darfur?  How can we muster the moral certitude to condemn the human rights record of China?  How can we possibly hope to assure another Holocaust is not promulgated by a rogue government?

One can argue that the Nazis tortured and killed millions of Jews and that Slobodan Milosevic, the architect of the Balkans carnage, was responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of Slovaks, Croats, Bosnian Muslims and Kosovo Albanians, while U.S.-sanctioned torture was only visited upon a few hundred foreign nationals of which, it would appear, only a handful died.

But this cannot be a game of numbers.  For, if it is, where does one draw the line?  Is it okay to torture one person, but not ten?  Ten, but not one hundred?  One hundred, but not one thousand?  One thousand, but not ten thousand?  At what point does one become outraged?  At what point does the behavior become unacceptable?

The answer must be ONE. For by violating international law and torturing even a single human being we become that which we profess to detest and, in doing so, we forfeit our own rights under the law.

The travesties of the Bush/Cheney administration have now, officially, been exposed to the light of day.  We can no longer pretend we don’t see them lurking the shadows.

It is incumbent upon the incoming administration to address the atrocities committed in the name of protecting the citizens of the United States.