Vice President Joe Biden said last Friday that he supports making a classified Senate report on torture available to the public to help ensure that the same actions do not happen again, Roll Call reported.
“Now this voluminous study has been done,” Biden said at a forum in Sedona, Ariz., alongside Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). “And the internal debate that goes on in the Congress and in the White House is, do we go back and do we expose it? Do we lay out who was responsible and how we got to where we are?”
McCain expressed his support for making the report more public. Biden agreed.
“It is not resolved yet, John, but I’m where you are. I think the only way you excise the demons is you acknowledge, you acknowledge exactly what happened straightforward,” Biden said. He explained his position that issues related to torture must be laid out before a country can move beyond them, citing the war crimes committed in the Balkans and other acts of torture overseas.
“The single best thing that ever happened to Germany were the war crimes tribunals, because it forced Germany to come to its milk about what in fact has happened,” Biden said. “That’s why they’ve become the great democracy they’ve become.”
