The Torture Photos

As a journalist, I always lean toward disclosure, sunlight, and public debate. Secrecy is toxic to a free society, except during narrow windows of time.

President Barack Obama has declined to release photographs of the techniques used by U.S. intelligence operatives against detainees.

The logic here is that the photographs would inflame and outrage the Muslim world and perhaps alienate our allies in Europe and Asia.

Mr. Obama’s position raises three horrifying possibilities.

First, American agents engaged in activities so brutal — and, as a growing number of experts have testified, illegal — that it would devastate America’s image in the world if these images were released.

Second, those activities were sanctioned at the highest levels of our democratically-elected government.

Third, we as a society are incapable of confronting what we have done.

It seems to me that Mr. Obama has two choices. He can either release the photos and allow our society to face the music.

Or he can convene a 9/11-commission type panel charged with probing America’s conduct of the War on Terror.

It may be that we will decide that the decisions made during the last eight years were necessary or justifiable.

Perhaps former Vice President Dick Cheney is right that torturing detainees was a necessary strategy.

What is certain, however, is that this chapter in our history can’t simply be swept under the rug.