Investigating Bush-era torture

The Americans are taking “a first, well-meaning though inadequate step back toward civilization,” said Denmark’s Politiken in an editorial. Attorney General Eric Holder is said to favor an investigation into whether the CIA used torture while interrogating prisoners of war during the Bush administration. We welcome such an inquiry. The U.S. disgraced itself under George Bush and Dick Cheney by using the barbaric methods “of the Soviet Union and other dictatorships,” subjecting helpless prisoners to sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures, and waterboarding. Torture always degrades not only the victim but also the torturer. It fails to yield reliable information, because victims will say anything to stop the pain. And in the long term, it makes the country using it less safe, because it bolsters regimes around the globe that torture.

Yet President Obama would be “wrong to turn his mandate into a futile witch hunt,” said Spain’s ABC. Cheney certainly bent the law, and the U.S. did things it can’t be proud of. But that was the past. Right now, the U.S. has a long list of serious problems that require all the White House’s energy. It would hardly be reasonable “to continue raking over an episode that from a historical point of view was aberrant.” Obama needs Republican cooperation if he is to fix the economy, battle climate change, and confront Iran and North Korea. He dare not risk failure merely to settle political scores.

In Germany, such a calculation would be unthinkable, said Christoph von Marschall in Germany’s Der Tagesspiegel. Postwar Germans have been raised to believe that “a nation cannot build its future until it deals with its past.” But not dredging up this disgrace may very well be “the morally correct choice.” After all, “what’s more important: punishing a few Bush cronies or ensuring health care for all?” Anyone who “sees the desperation of poor Americans” would have to say the latter.

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That’s a false choice, said Austria’s Der Standard. The need to reform health care—or fix the economy, or battle climate change—doesn’t excuse the U.S. from following international law. American democracy will suffer if Americans fail to condemn the Bush administration’s “reckless willingness to toss the rule of law aside.” If the Bush officials suffer no consequences for their usurpation of power, what’s to stop another U.S. administration from doing the same thing in the future? “The whole truth must come to light—even if it doesn’t fit the political agenda.”