I hope Bishop Desmond Tutu is willing to make house calls, because the United States desperately needs a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to be appointed immediately.
This is more urgent even than calls for a “special prosecutor” to be named by Congress to investigate the blatant coverup of torture practices, especially waterboarding, by the Central Intelligence Agency. Yes, the destruction of evidence of possible criminal activity is still a crime, and needs a formal investigation, but we need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission even more urgently.
The reason we need Desmond Tutu to pay a house call on the U.S. is because the first word in the Truth and Reconciliation process is “truth”.
Many of our American “religious leaders” who have the wide public name recognition needed for a national commission on torture are already identified with this administration and therefore would not have the credibility needed to speak truth to power.
We have a whole cadre of prominent religious leaders who have been bought off by this current political establishment through faith-based initiatives and/or the myth of access to power (and it is a myth as David Kuo testified). Many of our prominent religious leaders have not cultivated the practice of speaking truth to power, but have instead been gazing at their own bottom line and preaching a prosperity gospel, or have become more politicians than pastors.
There are other religious leaders in the U.S., it’s true, who have the will to stand up, and a history of doing so despite the enormous odds of being heard in the religio-political climate of the last years. But, in truth, they are often not as well-known. When successful, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission has to bring the public along so that large numbers of people come to recognize the truth of what has been done in their name, often with their willing ignorance of its true consequences, and sometimes even with their active participation. You need credible religious leaders who are already well-known critics of the abuse of power.
Truth and Reconciliation Commissions don’t work unless the actual truth is told. You can’t get there from here if you are willing to let people go on using language like “enhanced interrogation techniques” and not confront them directly with the fact that this tortured rhetoric is a cover-up for actual torture and they are complicit in war crimes activity.
We need moral courage. We need Bishop Tutu. I would trust Bishop Tutu to help us set up such a Commission and to help us pick a broadly representative group from the U.S. who could get this hard work done.
It is hard to overstate the urgency of the need we have as a nation for truth to be told about torture. Once you get too far down this road of moral decay, it is hard to come back. Ask someone from Argentina, from South Africa, from Rwanda, from Cambodia…the list goes on and on.
We need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission and we need it as soon as possible.
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