Public opinion seems to be against conducting investigations into the so-called torture policy. A CNN poll conducted in late April found respondents split almost evenly on whether they approved of the Bush administration's decision to use techniques that 60 percent of respondents called torture.
A slight majority said neither Congress nor an independent panel should investigate who authorized those procedures. An even larger majority opposed investigating the military and intelligence personnel who used those procedures.
Defying that opinion could bring Obama's presidential honeymoon with independent voters to an abrupt end, said Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist."It isn't that people approve of the torture ... it's just that they can see this turning into another long national nightmare where we flog ourselves in front of the world," he said.
Of course, not pressing for prosecution in order to avoid "another long national nightmare" is, in fact, implicitly approving of the torture. We wouldn't think much of an individual who committed a crime but then asked not to be prosecuted because he or she would find it personally embarrassing to be judged before their peers. The public nature of the process is part of the point.
I think Sabato is right, though, that Americans tend to avoid doing too much thinking about anything that reflects poorly on their country--now that waterboarding is being widely labeled as torture (regardless of what Hannity and others like him may say), Americans are being made uncomfortable. We like to believe that all violence we participate in is ultimately going to be redemptive for us and for our country. The way we talk about World War II demonstrates this clearly--we focus a lot on how we defeated Hitler and a lot less on what we did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To prosecute is to acknowledge that this particular violence was not redemptive, and to thereby cast a shadow on the "America as Moral Superpower" myth that drives so much of our culture.
This is why so many discussions about waterboarding have involved hypothetical scenarios in which the person being interrogated definitely possesses information that could prevent the deaths of thousands or even millions of Americans. In that case the violence can easily (if mistakenly) be seen as being redemptive in character for the community. We save many through harming one.
Redemptive violence in American culture almost always involves harming the "other", however--never ourselves. Sabato's quote points to that, too. We avoid making the responsible choices that would cause us pain and instead are always focused outwards, ignoring the forces that are slowly but surely poisoning us from within...
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