Obama's Choice

Tomorrow, Barack Obama will take the oath of office, and the Bush years, for better or for worse, will be behind us.

So far, Obama has done a lot, and more of it right than wrong, to run as inclusive a pre-administration as possible, and the pundits are all wondering whether this signals a new direction in American politics, and the truth is, it probably doesn't, and it probably doesn't regardless of what the Obama administration does.

The truth is that eventually, the excitement will fade. With his first official acts, he will begin making decisions which some will like and some will not, and those who do not like them will begin to cast aspersions, and eventually the bipartisanship will no longer be evident, even if the administration tries to keep the open dialog. I had a CEO at a job once who said "We make products, but we sell stories", which was his way of pointing out that if reality actually had any bearing on perception and ultimate success, Microsoft would not have put several better competing products out of business.

And so the perception will eventually turn. If it isn't Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, then it will be some other, next generation partisan, but someone will gain a soap box and a following and will loudly declare Obama the worst president ever, and some will listen. Heck, he's not even taken office yet, and we're already hearing about "the Obama recession" and there are still groups pushing law-suits claiming that Obama's birth records are in question, when in fact the state of Hawaii has affirmed that everything is in order. So already there are those who are willing to ignore the facts in favor of playing to the conspiracy minded.

Which (and that's probably the longest introduction I've ever written before getting to my point) brings me to Obama's choice.

It becomes ever more clear that we have engaged in torture, and that it was approved from the very top, by Vice President Cheney and President Bush themselves against Kahlid Sheik Mohammad. The President has as much as admitted it, the Vice President has as well, not to mention the recent admission by Susan Crawford, the Bush Administration official charged with deciding which Guantanamo detainees should be brought to trial, that we couldn't bring some of them because the evidence against them was obtained by torture, which would nullify any ability to win a conviction.

Now, President-elect Obama has implied that he is inclined to let the past be the past and not prosecute anyone for the war crimes committed. This is a political move, designed to keep the feeling of bipartisanship for as long as possible, but it is a mistake.

War crimes are serious business, and we as America tell ourselves we're the moral beacon of the world, and we tell ourselves that in our system, no one is above the law. And we get all morally offended when someone tortures one of our citizens.

If any of this is to be true, there have to be prosecutions for these crimes. Torture was committed. In our names, by those we elected to steer our country, and the only way we can remove even some of the stain of that torture from our hands is to hold those people accountable, to say to the world "yes, they did this in our names, but we didn't approve of it, and when we had the opportunity, we held them accountable for it."

Torture doesn't work. By all reports, it produces questionable results (experts have said a bonding scenario with prisoners provides much better results than torture), and it is banned by every civilized nation. It is a slippery slope we simply do not want to set foot upon, and having already trod there, need desperately to get off of, as quickly and decisively as possible.

So, Obama's choice is between risking accusations of a partisan witch hunt in order to prove to the world that we really do mean it when we say no one is above the law, and when we say that we find torture abhorrent, or to take the politically easier route of letting it slide and claiming that simply by stopping the policies of the past, without doing anything to atone for them, we will in any way wash the stain of this chapter of our history from our collective hands.

I hope he makes the harder choice.