Greenwald makes the point about our all being responsible for the torture culture more forcefully and concisely than I did in my last post:
. . . there is something deeply misleading -- disturbingly self-justifying -- about the stampede to depict John Yoo as some kind of singular, isolated aberration. It's redolent of the scapegoating of Lynndie England and her low-level Abu Ghraib colleagues for what was official government policy. The responsibility for the torture regime does not rest with John Yoo or even just isolated Bush officials. It's far more collective than that.
As a country, we have repeatedly endorsed what John Yoo enabled. In addition to abolishing habeas corpus, the 2006 Military Commissions Act (.pdf) "insulated government officials from liability for many of the violations of the War Crimes Act they might have committed during the period prior to 2006," as Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin put it. It also vested vast discretion with the President to determine what constitutes "torture." Nonetheless, it was passed by an overwhelming Congressional majority, with substantial bipartisan support, without even a filibuster being attempted, and with the blessing of alleged "torture opponent" John McCain. It still has not been even partially repealed.
As a country, then, our democratic institutions -- without much outcry -- literally amended the War Crimes Act, retroactively, to declare that those who violated it, those who committed war crimes, would be free from investigation or prosecution. The Abu Ghraib scandal was disclosed in early 2004 and George Bush was re-elected. Accounts of systematic abuse at Guantanamo and elsewhere were known before then as well.
Directing moral outrage uniquely at John Yoo and demanding that he be removed from Berkeley, while highly understandable in one sense, poses the danger that this broader responsibility will be obscured and that real accountability need not take place. If we don't have the political will to prosecute our highest political officials for war crimes or even remove them from office -- and we unquestionably did not and do not -- how can we simultaneously insist that John Yoo is beyond the pale? For better or worse, what John Yoo did, while revolting and radical, was within what became -- and still is -- the American political mainstream in the years after the 9/11 attacks.
This is a democracy, and so we are all complicit until we find a way to dismantle it and repudiate those who promoted it and even now defend its necessity. At some point somebody needs to do an in-depth article about the genesis and passage of the MCA. I want the legislators who voted for it to defend their vote in print. I want to know how many of them, especially the Democrats that voted for it, really understood the implications of what they did and how many understood the bill at all.
I mean Sherrod Brown, for gawdsakes, voted for it. He's supposed to be one of the good guys. Brown admitted he was wrong, but you get the feeling that these people don't consider the implications of what they do at all, except as to how it will affect them in the next election. They voted for the MCA not because they thought a minute about what it contained, but because not to vote for it would make them look weak on terror.