The following material is taken from my follow-on comment to the NYTimes column by Paul Krugman, published in the April 24, 2009 edition of The Times. I don’t know whether they hold the copyright, or I do. Here are the basic links:
Krugman’s column:
My response, an Editor’s Selection:
http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2009/04/24/opinion/24krugman.html?permid=17#comment17
and below:
I started academic work on a two-thousand year-old text with a central narrative of torture fifteen years ago. At that time, no one even dreamt in nightmares that the United States would condone torture. We were part of the international community that cooperated in issuing the Geneva Conventions. We remembered the War Crimes trials following World War II. I lived in a world where the gruesome tortures I translated could not any longer occur; this background protected me from the story of pain that I turned into English.
Halfway through the fifteen years since I began working with several versions of this central narrative of torture, that protective shield of U.S. virtue fell away. I wrote protests for Abu Ghraib, and for the evidence that traced such scenes of torture to the legal memos of Bybee and Yoo and others. No one published them.
Like others, I wanted to turn my head. I wanted to put this behind me — except that it’s my distant, irrelevant, academic contribution. I want to feel safe from involvement in torture narratives again.
Investigations and prosecutions will open wounds, or keep open the wounds we already feel, to know that this country tortured. I want to turn away, I want to say “Enough. I’ve done my thing. Now stop!” To many of us the back and forth of accusations and discussions and opinions is like hearing parents arguing.
There is a great deal of material already public, known, published. What is missing is public discourse about responsibility. That is trivialized as the blame game. It is not. We realize, for example, that Governor Blagoievich allegedly shamed himself, his office, and his state, and should be prosecuted.
Should not those who shamed our faith in ourselves as a country by advocating the international crime of torture be prosecuted? Should they be unknown, unquestioned, unjudged, so we can move on and put this ugly episode behind us?
The cost is our reputation as a country. The cost is a persisting national uncertainty about torture, the period when the U.S. *did* torture. The cost is the minimizing and justifying arguments that will linger and fester and erupt again, unless they are exposed and judged.
Sigrid Peterson, PhD
http://www.sigridpeterson.com/
