"Looking Forward"

From Joe Sudbay at AmericaBlog, this item:

From the Democratic Policy Committee's press release:

[Sen. Byron] Dorgan chaired a hearing on August 3, by the Senate Democratic Policy Committee (DPC), which looked into the Army’s response to the 2003 exposure at Qarmat Ali in Iraq of hundreds of U.S. soldiers to sodium dichromate, which poses the highest inhalation risk for cancer of any of the 500 substances classified as a carcinogen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The Senators wrote that they “believe that the conduct and/or inaction of KBR and the Army may have caused hundreds of U.S. troops to be exposed to dangerous levels of sodium dichromate,” and asked the Inspector General to investigate seven separate areas of concern.

Sudbay's comment:

We heard a lot of rhetoric from the Bush administration and GOP members of Congress about supporting the troops. Call me crazy, but I don't think exposing troops to carcinogens is very supportive. But, with Dick Cheney's friends at KBR in the mix, there was no way Bush or the GOP would ever hold KBR accountable.

The problem is, there's no way Obama's going to hold them accountable, either -- at least, based on all available evidence. This is part and parcel of the administration's refusal to investigate the implementation of torture as official U.S. policy, which it begins to look as though we will never recover from. (I don't take the dog-and-pony show coming out of Justice on this one as any indication that there is serious interest in holding those responsible accountable. Quite the opposite. I mean, come on -- they're taking morally repulsive practices which we have abhorred throughout our history as the norm.)

There's one simple and very basic response to the president's wish to "look forward" and to leave all this behind us: How do we know where to go if we don't know how we got on this road? How can we fix it if we don't know how it got damaged? (If the response to the collapse of the financial industry is any indication, there's very little interest in really fixing anything. Why am I surprised that there's no interest in fixing the torture regime?)

And I truly believe that the most serious damage to the country has been that those in power could implement a whole range of what are essentially the practices and methods of dictators and not be held accountable. I read a very interesting article some while back that compared the Pax Americana to the Pax Britannica under the Empire -- basically, the functional form of Teddy Roosevelt's famous dictum "Speak softly and carry a big stick." We avoided major conflagrations for decades because we had the biggest stick. Combine that with our traditions of democracy, of open and honest government that was responsive to the will of the people, our institutions that guaranteed freedom to our citizens, and a tradition of fairness, justice, and mercy. That gave us the moral authority to negotiate, to act as peacemakers, and to avoid using that stick. We have no credibility any more. And Obama isn't helping, by claiming the power to hold detainees who have been cleared by the courts, by fighting every attempt at openness and transparency, by throwing up distractions to avoid dealing with the real issues. This is change I can believe in only in my most cynical moments.