Did I Despair Too Soon?

In 2008, I pounded pavements for Barack Obama for a simple reason.  I hoped he would roll back the abuses of George Bush in his War on Terror.  I did not really expect or care if he prosecuted offenders, but I did want him to expose what they had done and stop it from continuing.  To say he has disappointed would be an extreme understatement.  He has stopped torture (at least as an official policy), but that is all.  Holding suspects indefinitely without trial, massive vacuum of data and datamining, FBI use of entrappment, surveillanc on legal activities, and abuse of many of the powers in the PATRIOT Act, all continue unabated.  Not only has Obama done nothing to prosecute Bush-era abuses, he is doing his best to keep them concealed.  All this drove me to despair.
But maybe I have despaired too soon.  At the time Obama took over, there were all sorts of hysterical warnings against prosecuting Bush era officials.  We aren't a banana republic.  We don't prosecute policy differences.  (No, then how about prosecuting torture?)  Obama himself said we should look forward, not back.  What these warnings ignored was that we were behaving exactly like a dictatorship transitioning back to democracy. Unless all-out revolution sweeps the old order away (which causes a whole lot of new problems), deposed dictators' power doesn't vanish overnight with the transition to democracy.  They continue to exercise a lot of it behind the scenes.  And one of their first priorities is to protect themselves from prosecution and cover up evidence of old crimes.  Often times it is best to let it happen that way.  Dictators are unlikely to give up power without the assurance that it is safe to do so.  A real attempt to deal with the past is too raw and too ugly when it is too new. 
Such, I believe, was the case with us as well.  Painful as it is to say, I do not believe that our body politic in 2009 was strong enough to withstand a thorough-going investigation of the crimes of the Bush Administration.  Too many powerful people were penally vested in preventing that; and many less powerful people were emotionally vested in defending Bush's actions.  You think our politics are bad now?  They don't even compare with what would have happened if Obama had made a serious attempt to expose, much less prosecute, the crimes of Bush.  The result, tragically, as been to perpetuate Guantanamo, to actually make it illegal to close it or to give a fair trial to the inmates there, and to cement the worst excesses of the national security state.  Many times, I have despaired.

Maybe that was premature.  Bits and pieces of what happened are slowly coming to light. Senate Democrats have poured over millions of pages of classified documents, studying the CIA torture program and whether it yielded useful results.  A report will be coming out.  I doubt it will change many minds.  Changing minds takes time.  But it happens.

This article gives me hope. The author points out that we've seen this script play out before in Latin America where, indeed, the transition from dictatorship to democracy was possible only by guaranteeing the former dictators against prosecution, or even exposure.  But exposure couldn't be stopped, and over 20 years it led to prosecution:

Each of these regimes left office armored with amnesties and immunities, with official decisions to decline prosecution, and, significantly, with strong public support for the use of torture as a necessary evil in the battle against terrorists. But in the past few years, former heads of state and leading figures in the intelligence communities of each of these countries have been charged, tried, and convicted of crimes that include torture and conspiring to torture.

What happened? Across more than two decades, public opinion steadily turned against those who had used torture. This process was driven by disclosures of photographs and tapes of heinous acts, by the meticulous work of forensic pathologists who gave the victims a voice, by survivors who forcefully recounted their experiences, by journalists who published exposés, and by lawyers who pressed for information to be revealed and who painstakingly assembled facts for lawsuits.

 We've been through this before.  Our government, in the Cold War, committed heinous acts, worse, in many ways, than what Bush has done.  Those acts have never been punished.  But they were exposed in the 1970's, the participants discredited, and the practices outlawed.  The War on Terror proved the perfect excuse to go back to the practices of the Cold War.  But the War on Terror will end, just as the Cold War ended.  It didn't even take the end of the Cold War to expose what had been done -- just a thaw, and a President who went too far. 

In 2006 I thought electing a Democratic Congress would expose George Bush's misdeeds.  In 2008 I thought electing a Democratic President would do it.  Both times I have been proven wrong.  But time, confidence, waning passions, and the death of a thousand cuts may ultimately expose what was done and persuade us to mend our ways.  It won't happen this year, or next.  Maybe, as in Latin American, it will take 20 years.  In the U.S. it arguably took 40 years from FDR's beginning abuses to exposure after Watergate.  But maybe playing a long game, exposing every chance we get, we can actually win this thing.  The wheels of justice grind slow, but they grind exceeding fine.