Barack Obama banned torture in his first week as president, and spent the next eight years in a good-faith, if failing, effort to close the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo. In our obsession with Guantánamo, we forget that Obama failed to prosecute the architects of U.S. torture, and blocked efforts to hold the torturers liable by suppressing the truth. Many divided post-conflict societies make an understandable choice in favor of truth and reconciliation at the expense of accountability. The pity of the Obama years is that America chose neither.
The paralysis of torture policy partly reflects the realities of divided public opinion. It also reflects the impossibility of disclosing the full truth without exposing officials to liability in Europe. Both dynamics are dramatized by an extraordinary new British controversy that’s been lost in the lights of Brexit.
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