Young: Holding someone accountable

WACO, Texas — Having John McCain atop the GOP ticket makes the 2008 election a referendum on the wisdom of invading Iraq.

Based on his latest pronouncements, it also will be on the wisdom of pedal-to-the-metal tax cuts amid war on two fronts and in the face of a $9 trillion national debt.

To really set the table, however, McCain could make Condoleezza Rice his running mate as many urge. Then the election can be a referendum on hyping bogus threats into grounds for war and on the wisdom of torture.

Rice this week primly turned aside questions about a report that as national security adviser she chaired meetings of the "Principals Committee" — Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, Colin Powell and former CIA director George Tenet — when it signed off on "enhanced interrogation techniques." That's the term previously known in the civilized world as torture.

But as the administration has said time and again, we do not torture — in business attire.

Ho hum. Waterboarding. A former military man recently told me it's not torture. That's not what U.S. authorities said when convicting a Japanese officer for using the technique on our servicemen during World War II.

When Japan did it, waterboarding was barbaric. When Japan did it, waterboarding was a war crime. And now?

Either it wasn't then, or we are war criminals now.

Americans have been so blithe about torture, as they have about such nuisances as the writ of habeas corpus and the right to an attorney.

"They chop off heads. What's wrong with pouring water over theirs?"

Define "they." Define the innocent bystanders subjected to horrific torture in Abu Ghraib based on wide-net sweeps in post-invasion Iraq. No, not every prisoner was innocent. But enough were to remind us why we treat prisoners humanely and afford them due process. They might be falsely accused.

Our credibility-challenged administration will say that enhanced interrogation (the torture it says it doesn't do) obtained information relative to 9/11. People who do interrogation will tell you that torture also results in false leads and bad information. Of course, the latter has never deterred this administration from its rounds.

It has done these things without a hint of accountability. The only one to face the music in a legal sense has been "Scooter" Libby, the middle-man in an effort to smear a CIA agent for being a dissenting voice on the case for war.

In recent weeks grade-schoolers in Texas have been under the gun to pass state tests, promotion pinned to how they do. It's curious that they would be held accountable for their acts. The White House? Nah.

Then again, the next White House could change that.

In an interview with the Philadelphia Daily News, Barack Obama said that as president he would ask his attorney general to "immediately review" the legality of acts by Team Bush.

Daily News columnist Will Bunch, who posed the question, said that in response Obama "tread carefully on the issue, in line with his reputation for seeking to bridge the partisan divide. He worried that such a probe could be spun as 'a partisan witch hunt.' However, he said that equation changes if there was willful criminality, because 'nobody is above the law.'" You don't say?

George Bush didn't get that memo. If his representatives weren't fudging or ignoring laws international and domestic, he was signing laws and attaching "signing statements" detailing what parts don't apply to him.

One of those things he said he'll ignore, in a military appropriations bill, is language prohibiting permanent military bases in Iraq.

That's another referendum subject in this presidential race. McCain appears solidly "pro." What say the people?

Bring 'em on.

John Young writes for the Waco Tribune-Herald. E-mail: jyoung AT wacotrib.com.