A Patron Saint for Hypocrits

This past week, while reading the New York Times, I came across a news item that discusses the Roman Catholic Church's purported attempt to elevate Pope Pius XII to sainthood. The report went on to say that various Jewish groups have expressed their opposition to Pius' canonization, and that Vatican spokesmen had responded by stating that the Roman Curia's standards for evaluation were Pius' "Christian Life", and the values and the teachings of the Church that Pius' life purportedly exemplified. What was needed, the spokesman explained, was a miracle that could be attributed to Pius, so that his canonization might proceed forward to completion.

This is not a Jewish issue, and attempts by news media to highlight Jewish opposition to Pius XII's beatification are an irrelevancy and a distraction. Indeed, one might suppose that among certain groups of Catholics, Jewish opposition Pius' sainthood might even be welcomed, both as justification for doing so, and, should that effort fail, blame the Jews for it. But Jews really have no say in the matter, and Christians, most particularly Catholics, should be mortally offended, as they, and not Jews, are ultimately linked to their church's historical record, and its past, present, and future reputation. What is at stake here in the 21st century is the good name of Christianity itself, as the insult that is implicit in this travesty will damage relations between Catholics and Jews for years to come, however this turns out. Protestants, and Orthodox Christians share a common heritage with the Roman Catholic Church, and common values which sainthood is supposed to exemplify, and they will be under pressure to oppose the Roman church's proposal as well, if they do not want to be seen as complicit. Why this is happening at this time is something of a puzzle, as none of the usual flashpoints of interfaith controversy, such as access to holy sites in Jerusalem and elsewhere, appear to be lacking. Relations with the Muslim world would not appear to have played a role, either. No, this is a European thing, and it arises from bad conscience over Pius' character and personal history.

Eugenio Pacelli reigned as Pius XII for some 20 years, from his accession to Pope in 1938 until his death in 1958, during which time the civilized world was literally turned upside down by military and social conflict whose echoes still resonate. In the decade before the outbreak of war in 1939, Msgr. Pacelli, as the papal legate in charge of negotiating the Vatican's diplomatic relationships with European governments, played a central role in establishing both the substance and tone of the Vatican's diplomacy, and in particular, toward a resurgent Germany that was aggressively seeking to retake the positions that Germany and the Habsburg Empire had occupied before World War I.

By all accounts, Pacelli succeeded in protecting the Vatican's legal positions in Germany and Austria, albeit through a cynical exercise of Realpolitik, only to see the fruits of his labors almost completely undone by the victorious Allied armies, whose governments tended to view the Vatican with suspicion, if not with outright hostility. If the Vatican factored into the Western Allies' plans at all, it was only because of the Roman Catholic Church's institutional hostility towards the Soviet Union and its ideological followers operating within the recently liberated Western European nations. In politics, the church was retrograde, if not entirely reactionary; it found its greatest support among monarchists, women, the elderly, and social groups that were fearful of, or antagonistic to, the profound changes that the war had made in their lives. If communism and its fellow travelers, Nazism and fascism, each claimed to represent the future, the Roman Catholic Church remained firmly rooted in the past, and it intended to stay there for so long as it could. With that kind of outlook, Pacelli's church could only oppose, and the world moved on without him.

By the mid-1950s, Western European Social Democratic political parties had regained their voice, and they were implementing an ambitious agenda of social reform that was only grudgingly accepted by the Roman church. It was only in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe that the Vatican achieved any real success by opposing Communist social initiatives, when their Protestant counterparts were too politically compromised to effectively resist Soviet-inspired demands.

The reforms enacted by Vatican II merely made official what had already been acknowledged since the end of the war. The Roman Catholic Church could no longer compete for the loyalties of those who hoped for better future than what had gone before. Economic prosperity and State-run social welfare programs undercut what remained of the church's claims to social legitimacy.

But it was in matters of faith itself that the Church's authority effectively collapsed; while postwar attendance at Mass remained strong during the early years following the war, a generation later wholesale abandonment of the Catholic faith was the norm. Aside from resistance to Communism, the church had nothing to offer those who knew its history, and wanted something better for themselves and their children. The last bastions of Catholic orthodoxy were Franco's Spain and Salazar's Portugal, and until well into the 1970s they remained the poorest countries in Europe. Their repressive governments, and the prominent roles that churchmen played in them, were an ever present reminder to Western Europeans, of who these men were and what they stood for. Even Ireland, the most staunchly Catholic country in Northwestern Europe, has broken its official ties to the Roman Catholic Church, in the midst of a series of sordid scandals over the Church's misuse of its power and position.

Most particularly, the Roman Catholic Church felt compelled to abandon social and theological positions that it held for nearly 1,500 years towards Jews and other non-Christian religions. The Second Vatican Council's promulgation of Nostra Atate ("In Our Time") heralded a new attitude towards other religious faiths, committing the Church to engage in interfaith dialogue, based upon mutual respect, and to combat religious discrimination and bigotry. Of particular significance, Roman Catholic Church officially abandoned its previous teaching that Jews as a people bore continuing responsibility for the death of Jesus, and condemned anti-Semitism in all its forms.

In the intervening 45 years since the Council's declaration, it is apparent that the Church's change of heart has not been fully accepted, and within the Church's hierarchy there still exists a residual Jew-hatred which of late has become emboldened as a consequence of the Church's avowedly conservative leadership. Now, in a display of existential hubris, there are those within the Vatican who want to make their wartime leader a saint, as if the intervening years, and all that has been revealed about the Vatican's role in enabling Nazi Germany to suppress virtually all internal opposition, and also opposition to the Nazi program elsewhere, have taught them nothing. It appears that the only stumbling block to this wish-fulfillment fantasy is the lack of a miracle that the Roman Catholic Church can ascribe to Pius as evidence of his ascendancy into near divinity. In all truth, the real miracle was that Western civilization was able to get itself together in opposition to men like him, and at enormous cost to defeat Germany, Italy, and Japan. The cost in blood, treasure, and ruined lives alone is a standing rebuke to the very idea that Pius' memory warrants anything to celebrate. If there is such a thing as an anti-miracle, Pius and all that he stood for would be it. How else would we describe the catastrophe that Europe suffered from Norway to Greece, and from the Atlantic to the Urals? For a church that claims to be pro-life, how do we explain the 100 million lives lost, or which could never come into being because of its complicity in these events? Was this merely collateral damage to the church's fulfillment of its political ambitions? No, the miracle that the church is seeking is one that would enable the Vatican to rationally explain and justify what they want to do, while respecting the sensibilities, the intelligence, and informed opinions of others.

Pacelli's central role in carrying on that diplomacy, and in his later role as Pius XII, his silence and evasions for the cataclysm that followed, can hardly be described as the stuff from which a traditional hagiography could be fashioned by any fair-minded observer. Since 1961, when the dramatic play The Deputy first made its appearance on stage to accuse Pius of both complicity and willful failure to act upon indisputable evidence he had about Germany's extermination program, the Vatican has been on the defensive, and even now, remains in a state of denial, difficult as that might seem to be now some 65 years after the end of the war. But from all appearances, the backpedaling and prevarication continue.

So, how might we respond to this news? Outrage seems to be a little passé. Msgr. Pacelli's reputation is secure as the personification of every willful blindness and indifference on the part of statesmen and lesser officials during those years who could have done something, but did not, whether for reasons of state, personal and religious bias, or political calculation. My immediate thought was that this would be an opportune time for a Saturday Night Live sketch by Seth Myers', "Really!?!" But this is Christmas time, and nobody wants to mingle bad taste with good cheer. On the other hand, we and the rest of the world have gone through a decade in which hypocrisy on the grandest scale imaginable corrupted our body politic from top to bottom; our national lives were damaged, and perhaps irrevocably so, by a host of people in high places, and their assorted hangers-on, spin doctors, press agents, lobbyists, casuists and enablers of all descriptions, and all those who all stayed on message as they drove our nation, our reputations, and our economic prospects into a ditch. Surely these people deserve a patron saint, and at least from my standpoint, Pius and his apologists fill the bill very nicely.

It is said that hypocrisy is vice's tribute to virtue; but even within the Vatican there must be some whose sense of shame would cause them to acknowledge the utter perversity of this opera buffa. And to what effect? Is the church so deficient in hagiographic examples that they must stoop to this? What possible good can come of it? Communal warfare and attendant massacre are the curse of our age, and here we have the world's premier religious institution proposing to honor one who was at the helm during some of the worst years of our bloody history, and an enabler and fellow-traveler who was complicit in that evil in every way. Pacelli and his bretheren kept their fingernails and clothing clean, while leaving the messiness of mass deportations and industrial-scale murder to others.

During those years, it was possible to argue in favor of giving the Vatican the benefit of the doubt, as church discipline was stern and uncompromising, institutional loyalties were strong, and skepticism had a partisan, frequently Anti-Catholic edge. But no longer. The Vatican has lost its ability to suppress information and news reports damaging to its institutional interests, and it lacks both the will to discipline dissident clergy within its ranks who cling to extremist views, and moral authority to persuade others outside of the Church of the rightness of its position.

Wonder of it all, the ultimate success of this shameful and misbegotten farce depends entirely upon the ability of the Vatican to persuade people to ignore the history and documented evidence that have been piling up for the last eight decades. But that is not to be. The Vatican can no more cause others to forget Msgr. Pacelli's personal and institutional complicity in what he and they did, or failed to do, then it can reverse time itself. This tells us more about the current Roman Curia, then about anything that Msgr. Pacelli did as Papal Legate, or later as Pope. Let us hope, pray even, that responsible Vatican officials come to their senses, and recognize that this proposal has no legs, and will quietly bury it in a place where we will never see the light of day again.

I read John Dean's Commentary on FindLaw.com (as well as watching him on MSNBC), and I regard his opinions to be sound, well-informed, and entirely consistent with my way of looking at things. Recently, though, he expressed an idea that got me wondering. He proposed broadening the tort of defamation to include unjustified attacks on the reputations of deceased persons, mentioning Michael Jackson in particular, suggesting that Jackson's heirs or legal estate might have a cause of action, either because calumny wantonly heaped on their decedent's name might diminish the value of the estate, and therefor damage their legacies, or cause them psychic harm. Bad idea, and for any number of reasons.

• Reputations are personal, and while they continue after the individual's death, they exist only in minds and memories of others. Disparaging a dead person causes no harm to the deceased. He or she has no sense of having been wronged, at least in this world, and whatever anguish others may suffer is vicarious. Having one's pride and self-image diminished upon hearing an ancestor denounced as a scoundrel ordinarily has no effect on the injured party, except as it may diminish bragging rights.
• Even if we were to concede some grievances might be legitimate, who gets to sue? Parents?, probably, but not in every case; siblings?, likewise; spouses?, maybe; cousins? Close associates? You get the picture. To protect the reputations of the dead, we would have to censor the thoughts and words of the living, so that the memories of those who are invested with remembering the decedent fondly, can continue to do so untroubled by dissenting opinion. This propels egoism to new heights, and I doubt that it would ever succeed in practice.
• As for the value of the estate that emerges at death, what sort of commercial interests would be permitted to claim injury to their bottom line? Is the right to preserve one's good name after death to be a transferrable right, such as an option to buy stock at a particular price? Is it akin to the sale of a business' good will? In commercial law, the right to exploit a brand name does not bring with it a right to prevent others from damaging that marketing image, by alleging vicarious injury to the reputation of a deceased individual whose name and image inspired the trademark. Even for the most fervent intellectual property lawyers, this would be a huge stretch. Even if the estate has no suffered monetary injury, a cause of action for punitive damages may lie, as was in the famous case brought by Attorney Louis Nizer on behalf of 1950s radio personality John Henry Faulk against conservative radio commentator Westbrook Pegler.
• The fact that many of the most prominent reputations belonged to people who were or would have been public figures within their own lifetimes, puts another obsticle in the path of those who would argue for this proposition. One has to prove actual malice, which is either intentional injury without justification, or a reckless disregard for the truthfulness of the statement. What happens to the reputations of people whose private lives become intertwined with public events after their death? Is a biographer to be censored because either a major or minor character in his story is reported to have behaved badly at some time in the narrative? And who gets to claim injury?

I can't think of any good reason to allow this idea to go forward.

Prosecution for Torturers, You Bet! And Here's Why

I like to follow legal commentary, and one of my favorite places to look is on FindLaw.com, which includes a weekly posting by lawyers, commentators, and law professors. Among those I am following are John W. Dean and Michael C. Dorf. John Dean was former Counsel to the President in the Nixon White House, and whose revelations of wrongdoing there eventually led to President Nixon's eventual resignation from office. Professor Dorf teaches at Cornell University School of Law.

Recently, Mr. Dean and Professor Dorf have posted articles touching on the question of whether Bush Administration officials who counseled and authorized torture of detainees should be held criminally accountable for their conduct. In an article published on Findlaw.com on June 19, Mr. Dean comes out on the side of prosecution, while Prof. Dorf at one time suggested that presidential pardons were appropriate. I confess to not having saved a copy of Prof. Dorf's article, and I apologize if I mischaracterize his argument in any way.

Nevertheless, as both Mr. Dean and Prof. Dorf have each gone public on this issue, I feel perfectly comfortable in responding to both, and I come down firmly on the side of Mr. Dean, and perhaps more emphatically than the tone of his June 19th article might otherwise convey.

Mr. Dean, in suggesting that prosecution might be the better way to go, cited as his authority the writings of Professor Samuel P. Huntington; and this past week, he spoke at the Nixon Library on what would have been the 37th anniversary of the Watergate Break-in. I have not seen a summary of his remarks, but I suspect they would have a great deal to do with the mindset of the former Bush Administration, and how much they had in common with the Nixon White House.

As it happened, I was in Washington in the summer of 1973, having recently graduated from an LLM program at Washington University's School of Law; and I was then job hunting on Capitol Hill and with various federal agencies. Having heard that Mr. Dean was scheduled to testify before the Senate Select Committee investigating the Watergate scandal, I was in seated in the audience on the morning that he testified, and I was forever impressed with the performance he gave that day. He, alone among all the others involved, understood the enormity of what occurred. In the years since, cohorts such as John Ehrlichman, Jeb Magruder, and several others have retreated into either religion or social service, and while they may have concentrated on such things as prison ministries or worked with poor Native Americans as ways to expiate their personal guilt, Dean alone went into the public forum to denounce the mindset and methods that allowed Watergate, and concomitantly the abuses of the Bush Administration, to flourish. Though behind his measured and lawyerly demeanor he may exhibit the fervor of a convert, on the merits Dean is right on the money.

Ten years before I first heard of John W. Dean, I was living in Hanau, in what was then West Germany. I had come over in August 1963 on a student work visa, and I extended my stay through the following spring. During that period of time, as I recall, 17 former guards at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp were brought to trial in Frankfurt on roughly analogous charges to those for which the Bush Administration now stands accused. I do not recall that any of the defendants were specifically accused of individual acts of cruelty or murder, but testimony heard that their trial was both sobering and disheartening; and there was also a public awareness, too, in a very public display of photographs and memorabilia to remind people, who neither wanted nor needed any such reminding of what occurred 20 years before. And these were people who bore their own scars of war, many of whom were ethnic Germans who had been born elsewhere in Eastern Europe and who were deported back to Germany under brutal conditions following the end of the war; vacant lots abounded where whole blocks of city buildings used to stand. Life was about long working hours, low wages, and the high expense of everything. Many of my fellow workers at the Dunlop Rubber Company bore the scars of war, missing hands, missing limbs, disfigurement, and psychic scars we could not see. Traffic on streets and highways was frequently crowded out by American soldiers, armored vehicles, and their equipment as they practiced against an anticipated war against the Soviet Union; they were an occupied country in every sense but name, and many people found the presence of an American army irksome, despite the fact that local authorities had titular jurisdiction over American military personnel who committed crimes against civilians.

The Germans are a conservative people whose public and private behavior is conditioned to respect and obey constituted authority. At the time I was there it appeared that as a people they were less questioning of their leaders than they might be now with sixty years of reconstituted and sucessful democracy behind them; but at that time, fear was in the air, not only of the Soviets, but of life itself. The last thing people wanted to hear about again was how their leaders and their soldiers had abused others. And yet they did so, and they absorbed the lesson, whereas we have not, and from the looks of it, might not be doing anytime soon.

As I was not then in the military, I also met, and hung out with, German students, none of whom had any memories of the Hitler era; they too argued passionately about democracy and the need to oppose tyrants and dictators. As I recall, most had only vague knowledge regarding specific historical events, as their parents and others were not eager to share their recollections of events that they knew about, and oftentimes had been complicit in. They, and each of them, had experienced family loss, whether in combat on a faraway battlefield, or by simply being unlucky enough to have been caught up in an urban firestorm touched off during one of the bombing raids they experienced nightly. I do not recall anyone there having suggested that because they as a people had taken such a beating, war criminals among them were somehow excused from being held accountable. Undoubtedly, there were many been living freely in Germany who were culpable, but that was largely a consequence of the Cold War, where the vast bulk war crimes had been committed in what was then in the Soviet zone of occupation. Also, after a few show trials and public executions of certain conspicuous offenders, their less prominent colleagues found ready employment in the new Soviet-dominated Eastern European security apparatus, and who could be counted on to deny witnesses and evidence that could easily be used against themselves. Despite this, German prosecutors continued to indict and prosecute suspected war criminals as they were found and evidence could be mounted against them.

Now we have former Bush Administration apparatchiks disingenuously arguing that because we all knew about what they were up to, even as they clamped a lid on disclosing documents and other evidence of their wrongdoing, that it is somehow unfair that they be prosecuted for the most serious and concerted violation of international law, and by extension the federal criminal code, in our nation’s recent history. The idea that we should now move on, while we are still up to our neck in the detritus of the previous administration's wrongdoing, is ludicrous. Likewise, the idea that former Justice Department officials can walk away from what amounts to criminal dereliction of duty on the premise that all they did was give bad legal advice is sheer sophistry. As to the punishment they deserve, revoking their bar license should be the least of their troubles.

As a didactic exercise let us assume, however, that there may be some merit to the idea that some form of clemency might be appropriate for those who may be liable to prosecution, but for one reason or another, we might want to give them a second chance to demonstrate remorse, rehabilitation, and that they have learned the error of their ways. If the amnesty granted to individual officers and soldiers of the Confederacy were to be cited as an example, let us also remember that federal troops remained in the South until 1877. The only other comparable amnesty appears to have occurred following the Whiskey Rebellion in 1796, when Mad Anthony Wane led a column of federal troops into western Pennsylvania to enforce the new nation's excise tax on whiskey.

The premise here is that we are dealing with people who knowingly and intentionally violated laws they were sworn to uphold, violating a fiduciary duty that extends far beyond a citizen’s general obligation to obey the law. Even the Pledge of Allegiance recited every morning by schoolchildren does not carry with it the solemnity and obligation that of the oath that we take upon entering governmental service, “…to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic…” In a pluralistic society such as ours, no oath can be more sacred, and by extension, protecting the sanctity of that oath is the first order of business for any public official of whatever rank.

Again, I draw upon my personal history, looking for an analogous train of events that could lead to a solution. In February or March of 1975 (and I do not recall the specific date) I was an Attorney Advisor (GS-12) with the Office of Chief Counsel of the Urban Mass Transportation Administration, in Washington. The call had gone out from the Executive Office of the President for government lawyers to be assigned the Presidential Clemency Board, which was then ramping up a program to grant clemency to opponents of the Vietnam War were either in exile, principally in Canada, or who had been convicted of violating the Selective Service Act by refusing induction, or who were military personnel convicted by court-martial and discharged from the service for absence related offenses, or who received punitive administrative discharges to avoid going to trial.

Conceived in August of 1974, President Gerald R. Ford's seemingly generous proclamation languished in the Justice Department for approximately four to five months while departmental officials exquisitely debated the precise qualities of presidential clemency they hoped to apply. Those elevated discussions quickly terminated when it was discovered that the department was more than three months into the program and had yet to receive any single application for clemency.

So, what to do? Without getting too snide about this, Justice officials did what all bureaucrats do, they looked around for anything at hand that could demonstrate some sort of progress. What they had, was a list of correctional facilities maintained by the Bureau of Prisons, which included the name and mailing address of every correctional facility maintained by the federal government, state governments, and their political subdivisions. The thinking behind this was, even as the inmate populations of these detention facilities were incarcerated due to civilian-related offenses, there may be those whose criminal histories were in some way precipitated by an unfair punitive discharge or court-martial conviction, or some civilian crime related to the offender's objection to induction into the armed services during the Vietnam War. It was a stretch, to be sure, but the BoP had little else to go on, and the news media, principally the Washington Post, was beginning to make inquiries. So, a letter went out to each of these facilities announcing the clemency program, and expressing the Department’s hope that eligible offenders would apply to the program, and perhaps a grant of presidential clemency might eventually prove beneficial.

Within weeks, the Justice Department was inundated with literally thousands of applications from various jails and prisons around the country. That is where I came in, along with several hundred others, and was detailed off to the Executive Office of the President to try to make things work. And work we did; in all something over 23,500 applications were received, of which only 2,500 came from civilians who had been convicted in federal court, or who might be legally liable. At the height of our existence, we had a $10 million budget and a staff of 600, that included lawyers, law students, paralegals, and clerical personnel, and we were overseen by a board of presidential appointees headed up by former United States Senator Charles Goodell. Not to make light of the situation, we all worked very hard at this for about eight months, because we had to develop standards for evaluating these applications in terms of the severity of their offenses, the unfairness to which they had been subjected, in a subsequent criminal histories, and these were rehashed and refined and augmented on a daily basis as we and the board became more street-wise and savvy about how things actually worked. We also made a firm acquaintanceship with the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and knowledge, if not a little cynicism, about the Selective Service System.

Also, this being a Republican Administration, the board members also wanted to make a political point that applicants for clemency could not expect to get away cheap. Only 9,000 applicants were determined to be eligible for the President Ford's program, and those granted clemency were required to do up to two years alternative service, again administered by the dysfunctional Selective Service System, or in some cases, the Veterans Administration. Despite some modest successes, and lacking any sort of political support, the Presidential Clemency Program quickly and quietly faded away, and what remained of the problem was completed by the Department of Defense under President Carter, and with no eligibility for military benefits. As between the board and its staff, there was a great deal of mutual respect; acceptance of personal responsibility and obligation to serve if required were shared values, as was allegiance to the rule of law. Even the most partisan board members accepted the idea that the law’s requirements would be observed and enforced regardless of personal preferences. We each did our duty, and took great pride in doing so, regardless of of the thanklessness of our tasks, and the near certainty that most people would never hear of our efforts, much less care.

Based on that history, I see nothing remotely justifying the self-serving and specious arguments that Bush Administration apologists are making in demanding that we “move on”. Instead of principled opposition to government policy, or inability to conform to behavioral norms in a military environment that we as Presidential Clemency Board staff members so often encountered, we have instead a cynical manipulation of all institutions in public life, whether it be media, Congress, or public opinion. This is not simply the effects of poorly conceived and executed public policy. Rather, what we have seen are concerted and prolonged efforts to violate the norms of civilized behavior, and using public fear as the driving force behind it. The idea that Justice Department officials could conjure up written justifications for criminal conduct that their authors intended to be used to deflect opposition to that criminality, and not be held criminally accountable is itself an absurdity. This is no different, at least in my mind, from a lawyer who provides his client with an opinion letter that he knows the client will use to commit a fraud. In the financial world, that lawyer, and those who purported to rely on his advice despite objective evidence to the contrary, would go to jail, as should these people.

I consider this offense to be as serious as any in the federal criminal code. Those involved knew to a legal certainty, or were chargeable with such knowledge, that what was requested by the Bush White House constitute a direct and felonious breach of federal criminal law; and I for one would have no difficulty in concluding that the elements of criminal conspiracy, fraud against the government, and obstruction of justice are amply made out.

Therefore, I would require that any form of clemency be accompanied by an applicant's plea of guilt to an indictment or information, admission to facts, and demonstrated acts of contrition (beyond the two points given for acceptance of responsibility, per the Federal Sentencing Guidelines), coupled with a period of incarceration or home confinement, supervised release or a lengthy probation, depending upon the affected individual’s degree of culpability.

If selective service offenses and desertion from the military were part of the spirit of the times during the Vietnam War, our political and legal institutions required that applicants for clemency show due respect for the laws which so many violated, even with good motive. In the present day that principle should also prevail. Those who violated the law did so from positions of privilege and trust, and therefore, they were under special obligation. They allowed political ideology not only to cloud their judgment, but to engage in deceptive and dishonest practices to help ensure that their judgment would not be effectively challenged. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, these people attempted to hide what they were doing in a "bodyguard of lies", because the truth would have sent them packing. Aside from the sheer irresponsibility of what was done, this was serious criminality, and those responsible should be held fully accountable.

Finally, like the torture that the Bush Administration sought to hide from public view, an amnesty is unlikely to cause anyone to forget what happened. There needs to be an official recognition, and now. It is a matter of record that in April, 1945, General Eisenhower ordered German civilians living in the villages near recently liberated concentration camps to march through them so that they could smell the stench of those places and see with their own eyes the piles of emaciated bodies so that they could never deny them, to themselves or to anyone else. While we cannot march a citizenry in denial through the Guantanamo Bay detention facility so as to know the look, feel, sounds, and smell of the place, we can do what national honor and self respect demand, to make known now what inevitably will be found out by others.

If we do nothing, the shamefulness of the episode stains us all, because we would now be complicit in that cover-up as well; and I, for one, will not be a party to that.