The New "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"

Secrecy is a weapon of mass destruction. It destroys a people who bear it. It eats away at the greater good until there is no good greater. It is time “to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world.” (Thoreau, Walden).
The Obama Administration has been trying to walk beyond the torture perpetrated and rationalized by the Bush Administration, but it cannot take the high ground standing in the swamp that simply will not evaporate. It must appoint a blue chip commission to investigate the truth about the torture, which is what a model democracy does when it goes astray. We cannot hold Iraq, Pakistan, or Afghanistan accountable or steer them toward democracy if we do not uphold the principles of democracy ourselves, one of which is transparent interpretation and application of our constitution. We cannot expect to lead by example and continue to sweep the past under the historical carpet for the historians to judge. We must attain a judgment now.
The argument that full revelations of truth about the torture will put our troops at greater risk is nonsense. The enemy imagines and propagandizes much worse than whatever happened. They deal in absolutes so preposterous and in some cases so accurate that our image is that of a monster, a faceless one at that, thanks to the drone warfare we are conducting and the collateral damage the drones produce. We are losing our democratic face, not because of what torture occurred in the past or any further revelations of it; we are losing our face because of our superior technology that removes us from danger and makes us a remote unknown, cold, mechanism of death. That’s the face of America the folks in remote parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan have of us. Revelations of past torture might put a face on the monster from our point of view, but it presumably will be a face from the past, not the present. The enemy’s zealotry is so blind, he does not need an actual face as evidence; he is certain we are monsters and infidels because of his absolute faith that we are.
Both Pelosi and Cheney want the evidence revealed, the former so that the CIA will be shown to have lied to her and the latter so that torture will be shown to have worked. The American public sees them both as culpable, so let’s have the truth and settle the matter once and for all.