Opinion: In today’s pages: Torture, drought, gambling...
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... and other things to get your mind off swine flu.
In today’s editorial pages, The Times editorial board examines President Obama’s attempt to triangulate on torture. Our conclusion: We can’t close this chapter in history without reading it first.
It’s now clear that if the country is to move beyond what the president called a ‘dark and painful chapter in our history,’ there must be a credible and comprehensive accounting of what went wrong and a serious study of whether the architects of the Bush policy violated the law. Equally important is the need to move strategically to secure two sometimes conflicting goals: punishment for any official who knowingly broke the law and accountability to the public.
On another front, the board builds on its Sunday endorsement of five of the six measures on the May 19 special election ballot by drilling down into Proposition 1C, which would revamp the California Lottery and get some cash out of it without waiting for the state’s numbers to come up.
We’re not enthusiastic about giving lawmakers the power to borrow against every penny of lottery revenue in perpetuity, because we fear that’s what they will do. But if the spending caps in Proposition 1A work as advertised -- admittedly, a big if -- there will be less financial pressure on the state to sell another round of lottery securities after the first one is paid off.
On the Op-Ed page, we’re back to torture, this time in a piece by author and KNBC news producer Frank Snepp.He knows what he’s talking about. Snepp was a CIA interrogator in Vietnam during the war, and by his own account he put his soul ‘at extreme peril.’ He draws a link between his actions and those of the Bush administration at Guantanamo.
Controlled brutality is a slippery slope, and once you pass through the moral membrane that should contain our worst impulses, it becomes so very easy to rationalize another step, and yet another, in the wrong direction.
Also in Op-Ed today: Molecular biologist Henry I. Miller chides government for standing in the way of what he claims is one rational and useful response to drought -- gene-splicing. And columnist Gregory Rodriguez takes apart Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s flirtation with secession.