Ex Gitmo Prosecutor: "Torture is a crime and the United States engaged in it"

By Steve Hynd

Yet another voice raised for prosecution of Bush era war crimes - former Gitmo prosecutor Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, who joined ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero in an op-ed for Salon (h/t Turkana):

Torture is a crime and the United States engaged in it. Those are two indisputable facts. Given the mountains of evidence already in the public domain, any effort to deny or soften that harsh and devastating reality is either disingenuous, uninformed or a result of the human instinct to avoid painful truths.

...To date, the evidence that U.S. officials engaged in widespread and systemic torture and abuse of detainees with the authorization of the highest Bush administration officials comes from a wide range of sources. There are congressional reports, journalistic investigations, detainees� own accounts, and even -- astonishingly -- boastful admissions by some of the highest officials of the Bush administration, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has been aggressively forthright in his defense of torture methods including waterboarding.

...But notwithstanding all this evidence that domestic and international laws were violated, there are still those who would reduce these crimes to discretionary policy decisions subject to legitimate debate. There is even a robust public discussion about whether "torture works" -- a jaw-dropping debate to be having in the United States of America -- as if that could be reliably determined, and as if that would make it OK.

This cannot be the way forward in a country committed to the rule of law that applies to everyone, regardless of status or position. We have a Department of Justice for a reason, and now it�s up to Attorney General Holder, the nation�s top law enforcement officer, to do his job and appoint an independent prosecutor to follow the evidence where it may lead. In this country, we investigate crimes and, when appropriate, we prosecute them. Once we start compromising our principles and laws because it is too messy, too inconvenient or even too painful to enforce them, we render them meaningless. This is not a political issue, but a moral and legal one.

It's a sucinct wrap up of the argument for a special prosecutor and, I think, an entirely compelling one unless you are willing to subjugate morality to political gamesmanship.