Editor’s Note: Out of the Past

Image Gallery image by Adam Niklewicz / www.illustratorusa.com

Clear your mind of images fed to you by fiction—of ticking time bombs and last-minute rescues, of “evil-doers” and misunderstood heroes. Then close your eyes and consider, just for moment, what it would have been like to be a detainee at Guantánamo Bay during the Bush years.

Envision being shackled naked, on your knees, hands pulled behind your back and over your head for the length of a transcontinental flight. Once you wrap your brain around that level of discomfort, multiply it by weeks and imagine your back muscles knotted into never-ending spasms, your legs and wrists swollen and blistered, skin on fire.

When released from that position, you are strapped to a tilting bed and a cloth is placed over your face. Water is poured on the cloth until it is saturated. You are suffocated for minutes on end, convinced that death is imminent. Just short of passing out, you are allowed to breathe. You vomit, then wait for it to happen again, as many as six times a day, for days on end.

No one knows where you are. You see no one but your masked interrogators. It doesn’t matter whether you actually know anything or committed a crime—you’re not likely to see the inside of a courtroom. And no matter what truths or lies you think to tell, the torment endures with no end in sight.

It’s a distasteful psychological exercise, but I implore you to try it. Because, as Slate senior editor Dahlia Lithwick wrote on April 25, “America seems to have lost its capacity to be truly shocked by anything America might do.

“[The images from Abu Ghraib] are no longer postcards from the unthinkable. They are what we have become.”

One of the many absurd objections thrown around when President Obama ordered the release of Justice Department torture memos in mid-April was that the world didn’t know the Bush Administration had decided to “take the gloves off” and throw human rights to the dogs. More confounding was Obama’s disappointing decision a month later to block the release of photos documenting the abuse of prisoners abroad by U.S. military personnel, arguing the images could “further inflame anti-American opinion.”

As the Nation reminded readers on February 9, Obama promised voters before the election that he would give them “a president who has taught the Constitution and believes in the Constitution and will obey the Constitution of the United States of America.” His fallback position since being inaugurated—that “when it comes to national security, what we have to focus on is getting things right in the future, as opposed to looking at what we did wrong in the past”—makes a mockery of that promise. It also threatens to damage Obama’s credibility and the effectiveness of his State Department.

The reality is that since early 2006, Bush’s minions practiced their dark magic openly, brazenly violating the Eighth Amendment and international law. In doing so, they accomplished what seemed impossible in the months following 9/11. As Miller-McCune editor in chief John Mecklin noted in August 2008, they convinced “large swaths of humanity that al-Qaeda’s mass murderers are morally superior to the United States government.”