Re: The Torture Report Must Be Saved. (See the New York Times, p. A23, December 10).
Historians will increasingly find much to admire in the Obama presidency, but not the fact that in the years of his first administration he failed openly to review the mendacity and nationally inflicted deludedness of the Bush years. A struggle for the truth was at that moment urgently needed. Wherever that inquiry might have led, it would have been a moment past that would now calmingly come to the support of the present. For we face the increasingly bewildering question of how to parry the dislocation of mind—a reign of disinformation—that a president-elect with an impinged sense of reality now uses to keep in turmoil and uproar a nation that has itself for decades dodged knowing its own reality. It is sickening to say, but however everyday everyday life continues to seem from a sidewalk view, we are in the midst of a struggle for the truth that is propelling us to the edge of what is felt as impulses for self-preservation where any comprehension of what is actually occurring could be lost for good.
We are in danger. And we must know this with a sobriety of mind that only the intelligent review of the nation’s policies and deeds can secure. It is exigent that President Obama now act, in the last days of his administration, as he failed to act in the first years of his presidency, to assure that the still top secret Senate Intelligence Committee’s 6,700-page report on torture be sheltered from a perniciousness that is only waiting in the wings, weeks from now, to dispatch it to oblivion. This hard won fragment of reality documents what this nation perpetrated on living breathing bodies that it held in its capture during the Iraq war. We need that report on torture to protect ourselves in the near future, to insist on a distinction between fantasy and reality that the president elect is incapable of, and not least to protect a past that has not yet decently been put to rest.