Guantanamo: le bourbier...

C'est l'avis de Hendrik Hertzberg sur The New Yorker:

"A week ago, on the same day that President Obama officially launched his campaign for reëlection, his Attorney General, Eric Holder, announced that Guantánamo’s most notorious inmate, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, along with four others accused of direct involvement in the 9/11 attacks, will at last be brought to trial—but on Cuban, not American, soil, and before a panel of military officers, not a civilian judge and jury. You may recall that the last time Barack Obama was a candidate he promised that, if elected, he would shut Guantánamo down (by then a fairly uncontroversial position, one that even President Bush and his would-be Republican successor had come around to) and that he would see to it that accused terrorists were prosecuted in civilian courts rather than by military commissions. He promised, too, that his Administration would not continue indefinite detention without indictment or trial and, of course, that it would put a definitive end to the use of torture. He has been able to keep only the last of these promises fully. The rest have been undone by a combination of political nihilism on the part of Republicans, political ineptitude on the part of his own Administration, and political fecklessness on the part of the people’s representatives on Capitol Hill."

Un peu plus loin:
"The collapse of Obama’s effort to close Guantánamo is the kind of failure that, in our atomized, increasingly dysfunctional political system, has a thousand deadbeat dads. But it has always been within the President’s power to remedy one aspect of the moral morass that Guantánamo symbolizes: the lack of any official accountability for the abuses of the past, especially the embrace of torture. There is no dispute that there was torture, that it was systematic, and that it was encouraged at the highest levels—George W. Bush, in his memoir, currently adorning the best-seller lists, practically boasts of approving it. Perhaps there are good, prudential reasons for stopping short of prosecuting those who authorized this vile offense to elementary morality for the crimes against American and international law that it entailed. No such reasons forbid the appointment of a truth commission. The work of such a commission, charged with compiling the record, affixing responsibility, and formally acknowledging what was done, would be a healthy act of atonement."

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2011/04/18/110418taco_talk_hertzberg