Mennonite Weekly Review

In the last week of March, a Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzón, began criminal proceedings against six Bush administration officials for authorizing torture against detainees in the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay.

Kathleen Kern, of Rochester, N.Y., serves with Christian Peacemaker Teams.

These officials include Alberto Gonzales, former White House counsel and attorney general; David Addington, former vice-president Dick Cheney’s chief of staff; Douglas Feith, former under-secretary of defense; William Haynes, formerly the Pentagon’s general counsel; John Yoo and Jay Bybee, both senior justice department legal advisers.

The lawsuit alleges that the six men created a judicial framework that deprived prisoners of their human rights, implemented new interrogation techniques — including torture — and established “impunity for all the government workers, military personnel, doctors and others who participated in the detention centre at Guantanamo.”

These allegations do not come from the international community alone. At the end of 2008, the Senate Armed Services committee found:

“The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ‘a few bad apples’ acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.”

Sen. John McCain, the ranking Republican on the committee, wrote: “The committee’s report details the inexcusable link between abusive interrogation techniques used by our enemies who ignored the Geneva Conventions and interrogation policy for detainees in U.S. custody.”

I asked a friend of mine who is a passionate restorative justice advocate how its principles could be applied in this case, and she said that both victims and offenders have to want the process, so it is not applicable at this time.

Restorative justice also requires the offender to develop empathy with the victim, and I have seen nothing of that coming from Gonzales and the others.

I noted that the number of victims would be more than a thousand, once you added the detainees’ family members, who went through the horror of their disappearance and will be living with their post-traumatic stress disorder for years to come.

My intrepid friend said that even if a few of these people wanted to enter into a restorative justice process with the people who authorized their torture, she would welcome the opportunity to arrange it, provided one or more of the accused also wanted to be part of the process. Often, when victims see true remorse on the part of their offenders, that is enough for them, she said.

I do believe that God transforms hardened hearts, including my own, so will not rule out the repentance of the six Bush administration officials. But until that happens, I’m going to have to side with the Spanish judge, because I want to live in a world where no one is allowed to torture or to authorize the torture of any human being in any country with impunity.

And I want those who committed these crimes, including their superiors not named in the indictment, to face consequences that will both prevent them from hurting people again and deter others from committing similar crimes.