Enhanced Interrogation and Collective Responsibility

I went to see the film The Reader last night with some of our classmates. I didn't know anything about the movie before going to see it, and I was shocked about the relevence it had to what is going on right now with the recent release of interrogation documents. We discussed in class a lot yesterday whether a hierarchical or a personal model of responsility (or both) should be used when assessing whom, if anyone, to prosecute. However, we never talked about whether collective responsibility had any place in the debate. The movie made the case that in the very similar situation of prosecuting Nazis for war crimes, the Nuremberg trials served to absolve everyone not on trial, but who, morally, should have done something. There were thousands of camps, one character argued, hundreds of thousands of people knew what was going on--and many even contributed directly or indirectly--yet it is so much easier to convict a few people as scapegoats rather than acknowledge the magnitude of the cruelty and the scary truths it revealed about humanity as a whole.

I do think that at least the people who choose to authorize the torture in our military prisons should be prosecuted. However, I think the argument presented in The Reader is a valid one and should not be taken lightly. The fact that we have been denying those in our prisons their basic rights as human beings and using despicable means to extract information from them should not surprise any American. The Bush Administration had long been claiming that we need to do anything necessary to defeat the terrorists, and Dick Cheney has always made his own views clear that this was a war that needed to be fought on the dark side. Practices such as waterboarding have been openly discussed in Congress and society for many years now. There is not a consensus on which tactics should be used. People who support the use of harsher techniques generally argue from a utilitarian perspective and those who don't generally argue from a deontological one. However, relatively little has been done by those who oppose it to end these despicable practices (although John McCain contributed much more to the effort than most). Didn't we all know these type of horrors were occuring in our prisons? Yet, as soon as specifics were revealed, people acted shocked. Would publicly trotting out a few of the CIA interrogators or exploited these methods--or even their superiors--really serve to accomplish anything in terms of a deterrent for others, or would its real purpose be just to absolve our own guilt?

On a different, but related, note, an ex-Nazi named John Demjanjuk has been in the news a lot recently because he is suspected of being notorious SS guard Ivan the Terrible. He was tried and convicted for war crimes in 1988 in Israel, but his conviction was overturned in 1993 with new evidence that someone else was Ivan the Terrible. Now John Demjanjuk is an 89-year-old in poor health and the debate continues as to his role in the Holocaust, as well as suggestion that he could again be sentenced under International Law. Do you guys think this is a valid debate? Should he should still be prosecuted?