Expert Advice On Dealing With A Prior Administration's Use of Torture

My heart longs for this advice to be taken . It just feels wrong to let it be forgotten , so it can happen repeatedly to future generations .

More 'sickening' truths about torture soon to be revealed:
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) recently warned in a speech on the floor of the Senate that almost everything we think we know about the Bush administration's torture program is wrong.
http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/06/11/maddow-more-sickening/

Professor Huntington's Advice

It is unfortunate that Samuel Huntington is no longer available to share his wisdom for addressing this situation facing the nation, and the Obama Administration. Clearly there are strengths and weaknesses in the arguments on both sides of this issue. Nonetheless, as I noted, Huntington did give his advice to those who were forming new democracies -- advice which he based on how the democracy was formed:

(1) When the transition to democracy occurred through a process of transformation ("when the elites in power took the lead in bringing about democracy"), or through what he called transplacement ("when democratization resulted largely from joint action by government and opposition groups"), then Huntington advised those in power, "do not attempt to prosecute authoritarian officials for human rights violations. The political costs of such an effort will outweigh any moral gains."

(2) If replacement – not transformation or transplacement -- occurred (that is if "opposition groups took the lead in bringing about democracy, and the authoritarian regime collapsed or was overthrown"), and if those in power felt it was "morally and politically desirable," then Huntington advised that they should "prosecute the leaders of the authoritarian regime promptly (within one year of your coming into power) while making clear that you will not prosecute middle- and lower-ranking officials."

(3) Regardless of how the transition occurred, Huntington advised that those in power ought to "[d]evise a means to achieve a full and dispassionate public accounting of how and why the crimes were committed."

(4) Throughout his analysis, Huntington points out, "on the issue of 'prosecute and punish vs. forgive and forget,'" that "each alternative presents grave problems, and that the least unsatisfactory course may well be: do not prosecute, do not punish, do not forgive, and, above all, do not forget."

Huntington's advice, notwithstanding how the transition occurred during our last election, still appears very relevant to our democracy, which is the most advanced in the world. Personally, I find his arguments for prosecution stronger than those against it when those arguments are applied to the Bush/Cheney Administration. But since it appears the Obama Administration is not going to take such action, at a minimum the Administration should follow Huntington's counsel to find "a means to achieve a full and dispassionate public accounting," and should make certain that the means chosen is not understood as forgiving, which would allow the nation to quickly forget.

The Insights of Samuel P. Huntington

I provided evidence in my recent book Conservatives Without Conscience that the Bush/Cheney presidency was the most authoritarian in American history. When doing research for that book, I read a work by the late Samuel P. Huntington, the highly- regarded Harvard political scientist and former president of the American Political Science Association. More specifically, I was interested in Professor Huntington's survey of the transition to democracy, during the mid-1970s through the 1980s, of some thirty countries that had previously been under authoritarian rule, which Huntington wrote about in The Third Wave: Democratization In the Late Twentieth Century.

Professor Huntington, who once served as a foreign policy adviser to Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey, was respected across the political spectrum, as conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg noted on his passing. Huntington called it as he saw it, and few have studied more governments so closely throughout the world.

When writing The Third Wave, Huntington explained that rather than following his normal practice of detached political analysis, he would explain the implications of his findings at five points in the book, where he "abandoned the roles of social scientist, [and] assumed that of [a] political consultant." It was in this context that Huntington addressed how a democratic government should deal with torture that had occurred under the rule of an authoritarian predecessor.