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The country went insane from 2001-2003.
In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.
Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.
I don't buy that this stuff is new or restricted to our political leadership. In all honesty, I don't know that if I were in Pelosi's position at that time that I would have objected. Fear is powerful and I don't assume that I would have done well in that environment, though I like to think that most of us have learned enough to change our relationship to human rights and authority in the last few years.
Nevertheless, our collective failures, and Nancy Pelosi's specific moral albatross, is to address this country's use of torture. We keep 2 million people in prison, in violent conditions where many of them are tortured, and we do it because it makes a certain fear-based lifestyle easier to manage. Atoning for our moment of overt lunacy in 2002 means acknowledging where it came from, and working to build a different society.
UPDATE: It's easy enough to blame Pelosi for this, and yes, what she did reveals a breathtaking lack of moral clarity and responsibility. My point is simply that state-sanctioned torture was not new in 2002, and the public failed to deal with it.
In 2002, I was 24 years old, and it will always be seared into my memory how full of fear the whole country was and how willing to tolerate anything we were. It's what made me a liberal. In other words, I can understand and sympathize with why Pelosi did nothing in 2002, though it was obviously wrong. Today, there is no excuse and atonement is necessary.
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