Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Several emailers want to know why I support Obama’s decision not to prosecute the CIA agents who engaged in torture of prisoners during the Bush administration.  To be honest, I’m not entirely sure that I do, but in case you’re interested, here are the arguments against prosecution that have run through my mind:

First: I hate the idea of spending time prosecuting the little guys while the big fish go free.  If there’s anyone we should be prosecuting, it’s Bush, Cheney, Addington, Bybee, Yoo, and Tenet.  Until that happens, it’s hard to justify prosecuting their underlings.

Second: Every agent would be entitled to a vigorous defense, which would almost certainly require them to make extensive use of classified information.  The government would naturally invoke the state secret doctrine in virtually every case, which would make it nearly impossible to conduct trials that are both fair and reasonably public.

Third: This would be a very, very big operation involving hundreds of prosecutions.  It would almost certainly drag on for many years, and although I’m not a lawyer, my sense is that successful prosecution would be extremely difficult.  The result would quite likely be a long, gruesome, process that would mostly disappear from public view except toward the end, when nearly everyone is acquitted.  Frankly, this might be worse than nothing at all.

Fourth: “I was just following orders” is obviously not an acceptable excuse in cases of clearly illegal instructions.  On the other hand, CIA agents should be able to rely on OLC opinions without constant fear that a successor administration will decide on different legal interpretations.  There isn’t a hard and fast rule here, but it’s legitimately something that needs to be balanced.

Anyway, my mind is still not made up on this.  It’s just a really hard problem.  But I will say that I find #1 persuasive almost all by itself.  If we’re going to prosecute the top guys, that’s one thing.  But if we don’t, it would be a massive miscarriage of justice to prosecute the field agents just because that’s politically more feasible.  We really don’t want to live in a country that does such things.

Fact:

Mother Jones was founded as a nonprofit in 1976 because we knew corporations and billionaires wouldn't fund the type of hard-hitting journalism we set out to do.

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2024 demands.

payment methods

Fact:

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2024 demands.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate