Time for the Reckoning?

In June 2008 Eric Holder told a packed house at the American Constitution Society's annual convention that in the wake of the Bush administration's authorization of torture, secret electronic surveillance and detentions without trial, "we owe the American people a reckoning." In the past few weeks, the United States moved several small steps closer to that reckoning. What form it will take is much debated, but there can be little doubt that momentum for some form of official accountability is growing.

President Obama has been deeply ambivalent on the subject. On the one hand, he immediately halted authorization of what Bush euphemistically called "enhanced interrogation techniques" and recently released four previously secret Bush Justice Department memos that had authorized CIA agents to slam suspects' heads against walls, confine them to cramped boxes for hours at a time, deprive them of sleep for more than a week and waterboard them repeatedly (in Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's case, 183 times in a single month).

On the other hand, Obama has insisted that the CIA agents who employed these methods should not be prosecuted and has advised members of Congress against launching a commission to investigate the abuses. He said he prefers to look forward, not backward, and doesn't want distractions from the many other items on his agenda. But when his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, went further and announced that no one would be prosecuted for torture, Obama swiftly backtracked, explaining that the decision as to who, if anyone, would be prosecuted would be made by Attorney General Holder.

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