«In his press conference Wednesday night, President Obama offered a nice little sermonette on “shortcuts.” Asked about his decision to release the “torture memos” and ban waterboarding, Obama said: “I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, ‘We don’t torture,’ when (…) all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat (…) Churchill understood, you start taking shortcuts, over time, that corrodes what’s best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.” It’s a nice, honorable statement. But there’s not much evidence it’s true.
[…] The more significant shortcuts are the public ones people can’t ignore. Churchill ordered the firebombing of Dresden just twelve weeks before the end of World War II. No one knows for sure how many civilians were burned alive, but tens of thousands surely were, in no small part to deliver a psychological blow to the Germans. If Churchill could have waterboarded a prisoner to avoid that – or stop the Holocaust – would one shortcut have been preferable to the other? Why? Or why not? Obama gives no sense he has an answer to such questions. You can ask the same questions about the shortcuts that flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki».
Sulle osservazioni cristalline di Jonah Goldberg non ho nulla da eccepire. Mi permetto, però, di aggiungere una piccola postilla personale. Il nome di Gerry Conlon è ancora impresso nella memoria di chi i diritti civili li ha sempre sostenuti, prescindendo dal colore politico dell’Esecutivo che si macchiava di eventuali violazioni, in Europa come nel resto del mondo. Ora, menzionare il governo britannico come esempio di purezza è quantomeno fuori luogo. Meglio farebbe il presidente Obama a dire la cinica verità: esistono momenti nella storia di una nazione in cui il clima di terrore porta all’adozione di provvedimenti straordinari che contrastano con la pubblica moralità. Sono scelte difficili e tristi che l’amministrazione Bush ha giustificato, coprendo istituzionalmente i servizi segreti. Obama potrà percorrere una via diversa, qualora lo ritenga opportuno (ed io stesso auspico un cambiamento in tal senso), assumendosi gli stessi oneri di cui il suo predecessore si è fatto carico. Ma il revisionismo storico non può essere condotto senza tenere conto del contesto temporale. Come ha scritto Suzanne Fields:
«Defending certain rough interrogation techniques to squeeze evil men for information that could prevent catastrophe, at a time when everyone was terrified, was commonplace, driven by common sense. Thousands of Americans were regarded as at risk of mass murder by evil men plotting mayhem. But now that the risk is regarded as small, even as nonexistent by some, and the debate has moved away from preventing mass murder to punishing those who in a moment of national peril thought the best techniques were those that were necessary and legal».
