It was William Wordsworth who asked “Where are they now, those wanton boys/ for whose free range the daedal earth/ was filled with animated toys/ and implements of frolic mirth;/  with tools for ready wit to guide,/ and ornaments of seemlier pride,/ more fresh, more bright, than princes wear;/ for what one moment flung aside,/ another could repair; what good or evil have they seen/ since I their pastime witnessed here,/ their daring wiles, their sportive cheer?”   

That was what Wordsworth asked.  As a columnist for The Nation, Katha Pollitt isn’t allowed to ask such congenial questions.  In this issue, she asks where the Bush-Cheney administration officials responsible for the torture regime are now.  Wanton boys they are, indeed.  But no longer do they range quite so freely over the daedal earth; Judge Baltasar Garzón has ruled Europe off limits for them.   Former assistant attorney general, now federal judge Jay Bybee gave an opinion that treatment which did not result in permanent physical injury could not be considered torture; as if “what one moment flung aside, another could repair.”  Their “animated toys” are to be released from the Satanic toyboxes of Guantanamo Bay and the leftover Gulags of eastern Europe; the “implements of frolic mirth” the wanton boys once directed to be used are to be relegated to the ever-more distant past, along with the photos that came from Abu Ghraib prison five years ago.  True, the new administration’s reluctance to prosecute the architects of the torture regime does raise the worry that they may be looking on that regime as so many “tools for ready wit to guide.”  And the wanton boys themselves do not seem to be suffering; banks, investment firms, universities, and think tanks have given the worst of them positions that could pay for “ornaments of seemlier pride, more fresh, more bright, than princes wear.”  Pollitt jokes that she herself would be better off had she quit journalism and taken a job marketing torture:

I could have nicknamed waterboarding “drinking tea with Vice President Cheney,” although come to think of it, waterboarding is a euphemism already. Maybe that’s why people didn’t catch on that it was the same thing we prosecuted Japanese interrogators for doing in World War II. In the Tokyo trials it was called “the water treatment,” or “the water cure,” or just plain “water torture.” Calling it “water torture” was probably what got those Japanese into trouble. That, and losing the war.

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The recent release of Bush-era “torture memos” occasions an argument to the effect that those responsible for the writing of those memos and the implementation of the procedures described in them must be held to account.  This must be done, less to honor a duty to the past than to establish a precedent for the future:

As a former constitutional law lecturer, Obama should have a firmer grasp of the point of executive accountability. It is not merely to “lay blame,” as he suggests; it is to set boundaries on presidential behavior and to clarify where wrongdoing will be challenged. Presidents, even those who profess honorable intentions, do not get to write their own rules. Congress must set and enforce those boundaries. When Obama suggested that CIA personnel who acted on the legal advice of the Bush administration would not face “retribution,” Illinois’s Jan Schakowsky, chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s subcommittee on oversight and investigations, offered the only appropriate response. “I don’t want to compare this to Nazi Germany, but we’ve come to almost ridicule the notion that when horrific acts have been committed that people can use the excuse that, Well, I was just following orders,” explained Schakowsky, who has instructed aides to prepare for a torture inquiry. “There should be an open mind of what to do with information that we get from thorough investigations,” she added.

There must also be a proper framework for investigations. Gathering information for the purpose of creating a permanent record is only slightly superior to Obama’s banalities about wanting to “move forward.” Truth commissions that grant immunity to wrongdoers and bipartisan commissions that negotiate their way to redacted reports do not check and balance the executive branch any more than “warnings” punish speeding motorists.

A short piece remarks on the success leading neocons have had in publicizing the view that piracy off the Horn of Africa is a national security threat to the USA.  The Washington Post, for example, the other day tossed off a reference to “ties between al Qaeda and” the group that recently hijacked the Maersk Alabama, ties which appear to be wholly imaginary. 

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