Open Letter to President Obama

Update below, links to other voices on the torture memos

Earlier today I sent an e-mail to President Obama, praising him for releasing the "torture memos" and encouraging him to do the right thing and the courageous thing: prosecute those who authorized torture. I then e-mailed a few friends, asking them to send their comments to the president, and included a copy of my own e-mail to the president. At least one friend immediately forwarded my e-mail to other friends and family. Now, a few hours later, I've decided I may as well post a copy of my letter. I don't have much hope that it will actually be placed on the president's desk. However, if we all remain silent, the rest of the world will believe that most Americans were complicit in these unjust actions, that we are hypocrites: accusing other countries of torture, telling other countries not to torture, and then using torture ourselves. Here is my letter:

Dear President Obama,
After eight years of a presidency that increasingly turned my country into something other than the beacon of democracy and freedom it has long touted itself to be, I was very happy to support your presidency. I kept up with the details of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the wire-tapping of American citizens, and with news associated with the incarceration of "enemy combatants." I was extremely distressed to discover that my leaders were authorizing treatment that has long been labeled torture. Today, my support of your presidency has been vindicated by your releasing what has been called the "torture memos," the despicable legal reasoning that led to a great Republic and democracy torturing people it deemed enemies, men who were provided no legal representation, no recourse to face the charges against them.

However, Mr. President, your actions should not stop there. Our country needs to bring to justice those leaders who justified torture, who sanctified such villainous actions, actions that reasoning people all over the world for at least two centuries have recognized as despotic and evil behavior.

Over two-hundred years ago, Voltaire began a campaign against the use of torture in his own country of France, with a case about a man named Jean Calas, a man put to the rack, forced to drink many jugs of water, physically broken, and eventually strangled when he didn't confess to the murder of his own son, a charge for which the state could provide no proof. Calas was considered an enemy of the state because he was Protestant. This torture was done in the name of the "law." Voltaire wrote his friends: "You may ask, my divine angels, why I am so strongly interested in this Calas. It is because I am a man, because I see that all foreigners are indignant at a country which breaks a man on the wheel without any proof."

He demanded an account, a public airing of this horrible miscarriage of justice. Here in our "enlightened" times, we can do no less. To publish these memos and then refuse to indict the people associated with authorizing such medieval practices is dishonest and irresponsible. The world needs an accounting. We need an accounting. The men who were tortured need an accounting.

Not to demand such an accounting is to tacitly agree with the practices, no matter how many nice public words one expresses in horror. The men who used such dry legal language to justify torture continue to hold important positions in our government and in our universities. They--and anyone else who authorized torture-- should be required to justify their actions publicly, in court. Remember, in doing so, we will be providing for these torture promoters far more justice than they provided for the men they authorized to be tortured.

As a mother of two children, one an adult (who also voted for you in his first participation in a presidential election) and another nearly an adult, I do not want my children to live in a nation unable to address its failures, unable to rectify its mistakes. If powerful leaders cannot be held accountable, the powerless are in a heap of trouble, if not now, then the next time power is unchecked.

Update: For more on the torture memos, click on the links below. Andrew Sullivan's post is particularly thoughtful.

• Andrew Sullivan, "The Bigger Picture,", posted 17 April 2009.
• Kevin Drum, "Defining Torture Down, posted April 16, 2009.
• TMPMuckraker provides information on the torture memo authors, "Who are the Torture Memo Authors?," posted April 17, 2009.