In trying to explain his startling decision to oppose the public release of more photos depicting detainee abuse, President Obama and his aides yesterday put forth six excuses for his about-face, one more flawed than the next.
First, there was the nothing-to-see-here excuse. In his remarks yesterday afternoon, Obama said the “photos that were requested in this case are not particularly sensational, especially when compared to the painful images that we remember from Abu Ghraib.”
But as the Washington Post reports: “[O]ne congressional staff member, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the photos, said the pictures are more graphic than those that have been made public from Abu Ghraib. ‘When they are released, there will be a major outcry for an investigation by a commission or some other vehicle,’ the staff member said.”
The New York Times reports: “Many of the photos may recall those taken at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, which showed prisoners naked or in degrading positions, sometimes with Americans posing smugly nearby, and caused an uproar in the Arab world and elsewhere when they came to light in 2004.”
And if they really aren’t that sensational, then what’s the big deal?
Then there was the the-bad-apples-have-been-dealt-with excuse. This one, to me, is the most troubling.
Obama said the incidents pictured in the photographs “were investigated — and, I might add, investigated long before I took office — and, where appropriate, sanctions have been applied….[T]his is not a situation in which the Pentagon has concealed or sought to justify inappropriate action. Rather, it has gone through the appropriate and regular processes. And the individuals who were involved have been identified, and appropriate actions have been taken.”
But this suggests that Obama has bought into the false Bush-administration narrative that the abuses of detainees were isolated acts, rather than part of an endemic system of abuse implicitly sanctioned at the highest levels of government. The Bushian view has been widely discredited — and for Obama to endorse it suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of the past.
The notion that responsibility for the sorts of actions depicted in those photos lies at the highest — not lowest — levels of government is not exactly a radical view. No less an authority than the Senate Armed Services Committee concluded in a bipartisan report: “The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ‘a few bad apples’ acting on their own….The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.”
But as The Washington Post notes: “[N]o commanding officers or Defense Department officials were jailed or fired in connection with the abuse, which the Bush administration dismissed as the misbehavior of low-ranking soldiers.” And the “appropriate actions,” as Obama put it, have certainly not yet been taken. The architects of the system in which the abuse took place have yet to be held to account.
Then there was the no-good-would-come-of-this excuse.
Obama said it was his “belief that the publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals.”
But the photos would add a lot. It was, after all, the photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq that forced the nation to acknowledge what had happened there. There is something visceral and undeniable about photographic evidence which makes it almost uniquely capable of cutting through the disinformation and denial that surrounds the issue of detainee abuse.
These photos are said to show that the kind of treatment chronicled in Abu Ghraib was in fact not limited to that one prison or one country. They would, as I wrote yesterday, serve as a powerful refutation to former vice president Cheney’s so far mostly successful attempt to cast the public debate about government-sanctioned torture as a narrow one limited to the CIA’s secret prisons.
Then there was the “protect-the-troops” excuse.
Said Obama: “In fact, the most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger.”
But the concern about the consequences of the release, while laudable on one level, is no excuse for a cover-up.
Glenn Greewald blogs for Salon: “Think about what Obama’s rationale would justify. Obama’s claim…means we should conceal or even outright lie about all the bad things we do that might reflect poorly on us. For instance, if an Obama bombing raid slaughters civilians in Afghanistan…, then, by this reasoning, we ought to lie about what happened and conceal the evidence depicting what was done — as the Bush administration did — because release of such evidence would ‘would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger.’ Indeed, evidence of our killing civilians in Afghanistan inflames anti-American sentiment far more than these photographs would. Isn’t it better to hide the evidence showing the bad things we do?…
“How can anyone who supports what Obama is doing here complain about the CIA’s destruction of their torture videos? The torture videos, like the torture photos, would, if released, generate anti-American sentiment and make us look bad. By Obama’s reasoning, didn’t the CIA do exactly the right thing by destroying them?”
Then there was the chilling-effect excuse.
Said Obama: “Moreover, I fear the publication of these photos may only have a chilling effect on future investigations of detainee abuse.”
But how so? Under questioning, press secretary Robert Gibbs failed miserably to explain that particular rationale at yesterday’s press briefing.
“[I]f in each of these instances somebody looking into detainee abuse takes evidentiary photos in a case that’s eventually concluded, this could provide a tremendous disincentive to take those photos and investigate that abuse,” Gibbs said.
Q. “Wait, try that once again. I don’t follow you. Where’s the disincentive?”
Gibbs: “The disincentive is in the notion that every time one of these photos is taken, that it’s going to be released. Nothing is added by the release of the photo, right? The existence of the investigation is not increased because of the release of the photo; it’s just to provide, in some ways, a sensationalistic portion of that investigation.
“These are all investigations that were undertaken by the Pentagon and have been concluded. I think if every time somebody took a picture of detainee abuse, if every time that — if any time any of those pictures were mandatorily going to be necessarily released, despite the fact that they were being investigated, I think that would provide a disincentive to take those pictures and investigate.”
Get that? Yeah, me neither.
And finally, there was the new-argument excuse.
Gibbs said “the President isn’t going back to remake the argument that has been made. The President is going — has asked his legal team to go back and make a new argument based on national security.”
But as the Los Angeles Times reports, the argument that releasing the photographs could create a backlash “was raised and rejected by a federal district court judge and the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, which called the warnings of a backlash ‘clearly speculative’ and insufficient to warrant blocking disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.
“‘There’s no legal basis for withholding the photographs,’ said Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, ‘so this must be a political decision.'”
Margaret Talev and Jonathan S. Landay write for McClatchy Newspapers: “The request for what’s effectively a legal do-over is an unlikely step for a president who is trained as a constitutional lawyer, advocated greater government transparency and ran for election as a critic of his predecessor’s secretive approach toward the handling of terrorism detainees.
“Eric Glitzenstein, a lawyer with expertise in Freedom of Information Act requests, said he thought that Obama faced an uphill legal battle. ‘They should not be able to go back time and again and concoct new rationales’ for withholding what have been deemed public records, he said.
“The timing of the president’s decision suggests that a key factor behind his switch of position could have been a desire to prevent the release of the photos before a speech that he’s to give June 4 in Egypt aimed at convincing the world’s Muslims that the United States isn’t at war with them. The pictures’ release shortly before the speech could have negated its goal and proved highly embarrassing. Even if courts ultimately reject Obama’s new position, the time needed for their consideration could delay the photos’ release until long after the speech.”
Peter Wallsten and Janet Hook write in the Los Angeles Times: “President Obama’s decision Wednesday to try to block the court-ordered release of photographs depicting alleged abuse of detainees by U.S. soldiers sets him on a confrontational course with his liberal base. But it is a showdown he is willing to risk — and may even view as politically necessary…
“Obama now can tell critics on the right that he did his best to protect the nation’s troops, even if the courts eventually force the disclosure.
“Obama has been facing intense criticism from former Vice President Dick Cheney and other conservatives, who have argued that the new administration’s efforts to roll back Bush-era interrogation policies have made the country less safe.
“The praise for Obama that came Wednesday from Republicans such as House Minority Leader John A. Boehner of Ohio and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina can only help undercut those arguments.”
But, Wallsten and Hook write: “Obama’s dilemma is that he risks undermining one of the core principles he claimed for his presidency: transparency.”
The Washington political-media establishment seems to approve of Obama’s decision.
Rick Klein writes in ABC News’s The Note: “In the broader context, it’s cast as a sign of political maturation, maybe even classic Obama pragmatism. This is what it’s like to be commander-in-chief — one of those tough choices where there’s no easy answer, and no shame in reversing yourself.”
Ben Smith and Josh Gerstein write in Politico that Obama’s reversal “marks the next phase in the education of the new president on the complicated, combustible issue of torture.”
Washington Post opinion columnist David Ignatius blogs: “Is this a ‘Sister Soulja’ moment on national security, like Bill Clinton’s famous criticism of a controversial rap singer during the 1992 presidential campaign — which upset some liberal supporters but polished his credentials as a centrist?”
But anti-torture bloggers reject the comparison.
Andrew Sullivan blogs: “The MSM cannot see the question of torture and violation of the Geneva Conventions as a matter of right and wrong, of law and lawlessness. They see it as a matter of right and left. And so an attempt to hold Bush administration officials accountable for the war crimes they proudly admit to committing is ‘left-wing.’ And those of us who actually want to uphold the rule of law … are now the equivalent of rappers urging the murder of white people.”
In a separate post, Sullivan writes: “Slowly but surely, Obama is owning the cover-up of his predcessors’ war crimes. But covering up war crimes, refusing to proscute them, promoting those associated with them, and suppressing evidence of them are themselves violations of Geneva and the UN Convention. So Cheney begins to successfully coopt his successor.”
© 2009 The Washington Post
Dan Froomkin writes White House Watch (originally called White House Briefing) for the Washington Post. He is also deputy editor of NiemanWatchdog.org, a Web site devoted to encouraging watchdog and accountability journalism from the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Peace and Justice Post 
Caught in a Lie: US Uses Phosphorus Weapons in Afghanistan
May 18, 2009Dave Lindorff | This Can’t Be Happening, May 18, 2009
When doctors started reporting that some of the victims of the US bombing of several villages in Farah Province last week—an attack that left between 117 and 147 civilians dead, most of them women and children—were turning up with deep, sharp burns on their body that “looked like” they’d been caused by white phosphorus, the US military was quick to deny responsibility.
US officials—who initially denied that the US had even bombed any civilians in Farah despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, including massive craters where houses had once stood—insisted that “no white phosphorus” was used in the attacks on several villages in Farah.
Official military policy on the use of white phosphorus is to only use the high-intensity, self-igniting material as a smoke screen during battles or to illuminate targets, not as a weapon against human beings—even enemy troops.
Now that policy, and the military’s blanket denial that phosphorus was used in Farah, have to be challenged, thanks to a recent report filed from a remote area of Afghanistan by a New York Times reporter.
C.J. Chivers, writing in the May 14 edition of the NY Times, in an article headlined “Korangal Memo: In Bleak Afghan Outpost, Troops Slog On,” wrote of how an embattled US Army unit in the Korangal Valley of Afghanistan, had come under attack following a morning memorial service for one of its members, Pfc. Richard Demeter, who had been killed the day before by a mine.
Chivers wrote:
“After the ceremony, the violence resumed. The soldiers detected a Taliban spotter on a ridge, which was pounded by mortars and then white phosphorus rounds from a 155 millimeter howitzer.
“What did the insurgents do? When the smoldering subsided, they attacked from exactly the same spot, shelling the outpost with 30-millimeter grenades and putting the soldiers on notice that the last display of firepower had little effect. The Americans escalated. An A-10 aircraft made several gun runs, then dropped a 500-pound bomb.”
It is clear from this passage that the military’s use of the phosphorus shells had not been for the officially sanctioned purpose of providing cover. The soldiers had no intention of climbing that hill to attack the spotter on the ridge themselves. They were trying to destroy him with shells and bombs. In fact, the last thing they would have wanted to do was provide the enemy spotter with a smoke cover, which would have helped him escape, and which also would have hidden him from the A-10 ground attack planes which had been called in to make gun runs at his position. Nor was this a case of illuminating the target. The incident, as Chivers reports, took place in broad daylight.
Clearly then, this article demonstrates that it is routine for US soldiers to call in phosphorus rounds to attack enemy soldiers, which is supposed to be against US military policy for this material. Whoever was manning the howitzer had a stock of the weapons on hand, and was ready to fire them.
The US initially flatly denied using white phosphorus weapons in Iraq, when reports first began to come out, including from US troops themselves, that they had been used extensively against insurgents defending the city of Fallujah against US Marines in November 2004. Under mounting pressure, the Pentagon first admitted that it had used the chemical in Fallujah but only “for illumination.” Later, the Pentagon added that it had used phosphorus as a “screen” to hide troops. But finally, in 2005, the Pentagon was forced to admit that it had also used white phosphorus directly as a weapon against enemy Iraqi troops in the assault on Fallujah, a city of 300,000 that still held many civilians.
The same pattern of denial and eventual admission regarding the use of this controversial and deadly weapon by US forces now seems to be repeating itself in Afghanistan.
It is odd that given the controversy over the use of white phosphorus weapons, which result in terrible wounds and eventual death as phosphorus particles burn their way down through flesh to the bone and sometimes straight onward through a body, leaving a charred channel of destruction, the New York Times’ Chivers—or more likely his editors back in New York?—ignored any mention of the issue while reporting on the use of the chemical rounds to attack a lone spotter on the ridge.
Given the current controversy over whether the US used white phosphorus shells or bombs in Falah Province only days before, it is hard to understand why the issue wasn’t mentioned in this particular article. Indeed, in the online version of the story, the word phosphorus is set as a hotlink to an article on the controversy over the battlefield use of phosphorus, indicating that at least someone at the Times has integrity and a good news sense.
As for the US government and the Pentagon, it is clear that they know the weapon is a vicious and controversial one, and that besides causing horrific and painful wounds, it is profoundly dangerous for innocent civilians, particularly when used in town or village settings.
It is bad enough that the US is using this weapon. It is even worse that it is forced to lie about it.
Surely if the goal of US policy is to win the hearts and minds of Afghanistan’s people, it shouldn’t be using a weapon that causes such terrible and indiscriminate wounds. Then again, maybe winning those hearts and minds isn’t really the goal. Maybe, as in the so-called “Pacification Program” applied by US forces in rural South Vietnam, the goal is to terrorize Afghan villagers in Taliban-dominated regions into rejecting the Taliban in their midst.
Requests for answers from the press office at the Pentagon, and at military headquarters in Afghanistan, regarding US policy on the use of white phosphorus, and on the specific use of the shells mentioned in the New York Times article were ignored.
Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. He is author of Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For-Profit Hospital Chains (BantamBooks, 1992), and his latest book “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net
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Tags:Afghanistan, assault on Fallujah, civilians killed, Dave Lindorff, US bombing, white phosphorus weapons
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