"I don't know who the genius was in the room that night when they were discussing this," the Connecticut Democrat said of the four torture documents declassified by the Obama White House. "But if you are going to make the decision to release the documents, I presume every one of us here would the have a follow up question, which is: Well, what are you going to do about it? And if the answer is nothing, we are just going to release the documents.... Some of us in the room would say, 'Well wait a minute, you have a problem. If you are going to release them then you are going to have to answer the next question, what are you going to do with them?'"
It isn't enough just to release the information. Yes, we must have full disclosure. We must know what was done in our names, what is the full truth of what happened. But we are not asking for retribution. We are asking for justice. If no one is above the law, if we are truly a nation of law, then we must follow the law wherever it leads us. President Obama has done much to repair our image in the world. The respect that President Bush squandered is slowly being redeemed. But if the crimes of the past administration are allowed to go unanswered, then we are bound to repeat them.
The whole point of Nuremburg was to ensure that what happened in Germany under the Nazis never occurs again anywhere in the world. Permitting torture for expediency's sake begins the slippery slope and we become no better than those we fight.
You can read Sam Stein's piece in the Huffington Post here
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I think you already know this, but Chris Dodd's father was one of the prosecutors at Nuremburg and he spoke eloquently during his campaign for President about how that experienced established his respect for law and personal responsibility.
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