Some actions have no remedy...

I wish there were courts which could right every wrong, but some things cannot be settled on this earth. Investigating, much less punishing, every excess of war is one of those things. I have written often about the limits of international law, and one of the main limitations is that it only reaches where the strong want it to reach. As much as the Nuremberg trials are praised, the treaty which created the tribunal deliberately omitted any investigations or trials for atrocities committed by the victors. (Can you imagine FDR or Churchill, much less Stalin, allowing investigations by an international tribunal of our conduct of the war?)

The conumdrum of any powerful government to investigate itself while it tries to protect its interests, guard its allies, and defend itself from dangerous enemies does not go away. Peggy Noonan writes:

'Torture is bad, and as to whether the procedures outlined in the memos constituted torture, you could do worse than follow the wisdom of John McCain, who says, "Waterboarding is torture, period." This is something he'd know about. Abuse is wrong not only in a specific and immediate sense but in a larger one: It coarsens and damages the nation that does it while undermining its reputation in the world and its trust in itself. I freely admit it is easy to say this on a pretty day in spring 2009, and might not have been when 3,000 Americans had just been killed. In New York it took months for us to lose the terrible, burnt-plastic smell of the smoke. The earliest memos were written by men who still had the smell of smoke in their noses.

'Why have reservations, then, about release of the memos and the investigations that will no doubt follow?

'For these reasons. Prisoner abuse has been banned. Mr. Obama himself, as he notes in the quote above, banned it. It's over. The press, with great difficulty, and if arguably belatedly, did and is doing its job: It uncovered and revealed the abuse. The historians are descending, as they should. Hearings, commissions or prosecutors would suck all the oxygen out of the room and come to obsess the capital, taking focus off two actual, immediate and pressing emergencies, the economy and the age of terror. Hearings, especially, would likely tear up the country as we descended into opposing camps. They would damage or burden America's intelligence services, and likely result in the abuse of those who acted from high motives, having been advised their actions were legal. As for the memo writers, some of whose constitutional theories were apparently tilted to the extreme in favor of the executive, it is hard to see how it would help future administrations, or this one, to have such advice, however incorrectly formulated, criminalized.'

I remember the 1970s very well, in particular, the hunt for culprits of any excesses in the Cold War and Vietnam War. We are doing the same now, that is, turning differences of opinion on public policy, in particular, national security, into crimes. Some injustices have no legal remedy, and revenge must be left to God.