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.
It was only a month ago that Secretary 
Foreign militants were reportedly among the dead, 
Peace and Justice Post 
Obama’s Embrace of Bush Terrorism Policies is Celebrated as “Centrism”
May 20, 2009by Glenn Greenwald | Salon.com, May 19, 2009
I wonder how many people from across the political spectrum will have to point this out before Obama defenders will finally admit that it’s true. From Harvard Law Professor and former Bush OLC lawyer Jack Goldsmith, systematically assessing Obama’s “terrorism” policies in The New Republic:
Most critically, Goldsmith expresses admiration for Obama’s rhetorical and symbolic changes — such as Obama’s emphasis on obtaining Congressional support for Bush’s policies while highlighting his deep concern for “civil liberties” — because Goldsmith believes that Obama’s rhetoric vests Bush’s policies with more credibility, ensures more bipartisan and Congressional support for these policies, makes them more palatable to Democrats, and thus ensures that those policies will endure in a stronger and longer-lasting form:
What’s most striking about the denial of so many Obama supporters about all of this is that Obama officials haven’t really tried to hide it. White House counsel Greg Craig told The New York Times‘ Charlie Savage back in February that Obama “is also mindful as president of the United States not to do anything that would undermine or weaken the institution of the presidency.” It was in that same article where Savage — a favorite of Bush critics when Bush was president — warned that after the first week of Executive Orders, “the Obama administration is quietly signaling continued support for other major elements of its predecessor’s approach to fighting Al Qaeda.”
Notably, Savage’s article was written almost three months ago, well before Obama’s announcement that he was adopting many of the most extreme Bush policies. At the time of Savage’s February article, I wrote: “while believing that Savage’s article is of great value in sounding the right alarm bells, I think that he paints a slightly more pessimistic picture on the civil liberties front than is warranted by the evidence thus far (though only slightly).” But as it turns out, it was Savage who was clearly right. As Politico‘s Josh Gerstein recently wrote about Obama’s Terrorism policies: “A few, like MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, have even hurled the left’s ultimate epithet — suggesting that Obama’s turning into George W. Bush.”
* * * * *
In his New Republic article today, Goldsmith reviews what he calls the “eleven essential elements” of “the Bush approach to counterterrorism policy” and documents how — with only a couple of minor exceptions — Obama has embraced all of them. In those cases where Obama has purported to “change” these elements, those changes are almost all symbolic and ceremonial, and the few changes that have any substance to them (banning the already-empty CIA black sites and prohibiting no-longer-authorized torture techniques) are far less substantial than Obama officials purport. None of Goldsmith’s analysis is grounded in the proposition that Obama hasn’t yet acted to change Bush policies, thus rendering a nonsequitur the response that “Obama needs more time; it’s only been 4 months.” Goldsmith is describing affirmative steps Obama has already announced to adopt the core Bush “terrorism” policies.
Just consider some of Goldsmith’s examples: Obama makes a melodramatic showing of ordering Guantanamo closed but then re-creates its systematic denial of detainee rights in Bagram, and “[l]ast month Secretary of Defense Gates hinted that up to 100 suspected terrorists would be detained without trial.” Obama announces that all interrogations must comply with the Army Field Manual but then has his CIA Director announce that he will seek greater interrogation authority whenever it is needed and convenes a task force to determine which enhanced interrogation methods beyond the Field Manual should be authorized. He railed against Bush’s Guantanamo military commissions but then preserved them with changes that are plainly cosmetic.
Obama has been at least as aggressive as Bush was in asserting radical secrecy doctrines in order to prevent courts from ruling on illegal torture and spying programs and to block victims from having a day in court. He has continued and even “ramped up” so-called “targeted killings” in Pakistan and Afghanistan which, as Goldsmith puts it, “have predictably caused more collateral damage to innocent civilians.” He has maintained not only Bush’s rendition policy but also the standard used to determine to which countries a suspect can be rendered, and has kept Bush’s domestic surveillance policies in place and unchanged. Most of all, he has emphatically endorsed the Bush/Cheney paradigm that we are engaged in a “war” against Terrorists — with all of the accompanying presidential “war powers” — rather than the law enforcement challenge that John Kerry, among others, advocated.
* * * * *
What is, in my view, most noteworthy about all of this is how it gives the lie to the collective national claim that we learned our lesson and are now regretful about the Bush/Cheney approach to Terrorism. Republicans are right about the fact that while it was Bush officials who led the way in implementing these radical and lawless policies, most of the country’s institutions — particularly the Democratic Party leadership and the media — acquiesced to it, endorsed it, and enabled it And they still do.
Nothing has produced as much media praise for Obama as his embrace of what Goldsmith calls the “essential elements” of “the Bush approach to counterterrorism policy.” That’s because — contrary to the ceremonial displays of regret and denouncements of Bush — the dominant media view is this: the Bush/Cheney approach to Terrorism was right; those policies are “centrist”; Obama is acting commendably by embracing them; most of the country wants those policies; and only the Far Left opposes the Bush/Cheney approach.
Anyone who doubts that should consider this most extraordinary paragraph from Associated Press’ Liz Sidoti:
When it comes to torture and Bush’s Terrorism policies, it’s the Far Left (which opposes those things) versus “the rest of the country” (which favors them). And she described Obama’s embrace of Bush’s policies as “governing from the center.” Apparently, Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies are Centrist. Who knew? Her AP colleague Tom Raum said virtually the same thing today:
Adopting the Bush/Cheney approach to war and Terrorism is to “move toward the middle.” That’s because only “liberal purists” oppose those policies. The Washington Post‘s CIA spokesman David Ignatius (who I would choose if I had to identify one individual who most embodies the rot of the American political press) celebrated Obama’s recent embrace of Bush Terrorism policies as his “Sister Souljah moment” as he “polished his credentials as a centrist,” and then returned again to announce that “Obama put his responsibilities as commander in chief first — and his loyalty to fellow Democrats second.”
As Maureen Dowd pointed out in the non-plagiarized part of her column on Sunday, the reason Bush was able to do what he did is because “very few watchdogs – in the Democratic Party or the press – were pushing back against the Bush horde in 2002 and 2003, when magazines were gushing about W. and Cheney as conquering heroes.” But all of this recent media commentary makes clear that media stars and Democratic leaders now are only pretending to find Bush/Cheney policies repugnant because Bush is now so unpopular and his policies were proven to be failures. As a result, a new face is needed for those policies, but the belief in the rightness of those policies hasn’t changed. They still consider Bush/Cheney policies “centrist” and responsible — only Leftist Purists oppose them — and thus heap praise on Obama for embracing them. We’re still the same country we were in 2003. Our media stars and political leaders from both parties still think the same way. That’s why the more Obama embraces the Bush/Cheney approach, the more praise he gets for Centrism.
What is most damaging about all of this is exactly what Goldsmith celebrated: that Obama’s political skills, combined with his status as a Democrat, is strengthening Bush/Cheney terrorism policies and solidifying them further. For the last eight years, roughly half the country — Republicans, Bush followers — was trained to cheer for indefinite detention, presidential secrecy, military commissions, warrantless eavesdropping, denial of due process, a blind acceptance of any presidential assertion that these policies are necessary to Keep Us Safe, and the claim that only fringe Far Leftist Purists — civil liberties extremists — could possibly object to any of that.
Now, much of the other half of the country, the one that once opposed those policies — Democrats, Obama supporters — are now reciting the same lines, adopting the same mentality, because doing so is necessary to justify what Obama is doing. It’s hard to dispute the Right’s claim that Bush’s Terrorism approach is being vindicated by Obama’s embrace of its “essential elements.” That’s what Goldsmith means when he says that Obama is making these policies stronger and more palatable, and it’s what media stars mean when they describe Bush/Cheney policies as Centrist: now that it’s not just an unpopular Republican President but also a highly charismatic and popular Democratic President advocating and defending these core Bush/Cheney policies, they do become the political consensus of the United States.
Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book “How Would a Patriot Act?,” a critique of the Bush administration’s use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, “A Tragic Legacy“, examines the Bush legacy.
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Tags:Bush terrorism policies, Glenn Greenwald, Jack Goldsmith, President Obama
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