President Obama's greatest torture mistake
by digby
Here's something I didn't know, from Jane Mayer's piece this week in the New Yorker:
There was a way to address the matter that might have avoided much of the partisan trivialization. In a White House meeting in early 2009, Greg Craig, President Obama’s White House Counsel, recommended the formation of an independent commission. Nearly every adviser in the room endorsed the idea, including such national-security hawks as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, and the President’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. Leon Panetta, the C.I.A. director at the time, also supported it. Obama, however, said that he didn’t want to seem to be taking punitive measures against his predecessor, apparently because he still hoped to reach bipartisan agreement on issues such as closing Guantánamo.
Well that certainly worked out well.
There are a few different ways to look at this. First, it's yet another example of Obama believing his own hype back at the beginning of the administration. And you can't entirely blame him. The delirious belief in his supernatural power to accomplish things that no mere mortal could dream of accomplishing was thick in our culture at the time. We've seen this impulse at play throughout the first term. If this was what motivated him, it took him a long time to figure out that it wasn't going to work. He was still quixotically angling for bipartisan agreement years later with the budget deals.
But look at that group of people on the other side of that decision. But they would not have the responsibility of protecting the presidency would they? That's also what could have been at work here: presidents cover each others' asses out of fear of future retribution from their rivals' successors. The presidential protection racket. And considering that's what he's reported to have been concerned about one has to assume that at least played into his thinking.
And there's always the possibility that he didn't want anything tying his hands. Presidents are protective of their prerogatives and it's entirely possible that as much as he might have personally thought torture was wrong, he hoped to make the issue fade away before he got into a battle over presidential authority.
We can't know what was going through his mind. But if this is true, it was one of his biggest errors in judgement. We are now living in a country that endorses torture and, at best, sees it as a political issue. And the world knows that if the US Government continues to use it, the people will back it. That has made us far more vulnerable and far less safe. We are an extremely powerful rogue nation that openly says we don't care about the rule of law or international norms of behavior.
Mayer writes:
Obama has made plain in his public statements and in his executive orders that torture, which is how he forthrightly labelled the program, was unacceptable. But, in leaving matters to the Senate, he left the truth open to debate. He further complicated things by appointing John Brennan to run the C.I.A., even though Brennan, as a top officer in the agency, had worked closely with George Tenet, the director during the worst excesses of the program. Last Thursday, in a rare press conference, Brennan called the C.I.A.’s past practices “abhorrent” but declined to say that they amounted to torture, undercutting Obama. Democrats called for Brennan and other C.I.A. personnel to be “purged.” Senator Mark Udall, who sits on the Intelligence Committee, said, “If there is no moral leadership from the White House, what’s to stop the next White House and C.I.A. director from supporting torture?
Back in the day people used to rhetorically ask: "Why do they hate us?" and people would either shrug their shoulders or sputter about how we are misunderstood. Today if someone asks the question, the ready answer is: Because the US is a barbaric superpower that will stop at nothing, not even torture. I can't argue against that.
Hillary Clinton thinks our problem as a culture is that we don't tell the good stories about ourselves anymore. Since more than half the people in this country are torture advocates, I'm not sure how you make any case for our "goodness" anymore. Good luck with trying to paper this over.
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