The first sign came in the press briefing yesterday when White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, asked if the decision to approve the release of further pictures of prisoners being abused by US military personnel could be reversed, replied “I don’t want to get into that right now.”
“So you can’t commit either way?” the reporter asked.
“I’m not going to add much to that right now.”
Bill Kristol spotted it, and concluded that it “sounds to me as if the president is getting ready to reverse the decision of his Justice Department. I expect him to announce, perhaps citing his discussions today with General Odierno and Ambassador Chris Hill, that he’s decided it would be damaging to our soldiers and the nation to release these photos.”
He was dead right. Today, the confirmation came (WaPo, NYT) as Gibbs told gathered pressmen that the White House would oppose the release of the images because, “The president strongly believes that the release of these photos, particularly at this time, would only serve the purpose of inflaming the theaters of war, jeopardizing U.S. forces, and making our job more difficult in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.”
The argument about the impact of the images in theatres of war doesn’t add up to me: especially if, as is said, this lot are not as bad as the ones already circulated from Abu Ghraib. After all, the administration has already brought the matter to the front of the public mind by deciding to release them and then changing course. Now enemies of the United States are left free to conjure whatever sordid details they like from the image of a bank of secrets locked up in the Pentagon.
Decisively drawing a line under the whole sordid affair by publically revealing the crimes and prosecuting those involved would have been far more likely to have a positive effect in the Middle East and Asia than this kind of cover up, since - admittedly unfairly - this decision just makes Obama look to be no better than Bush. As the ACLU said today, “The Obama administration’s adoption of the stonewalling tactics and opaque policies of the Bush administration flies in the face of the president’s stated desire to restore the rule of law, to revive our moral standing in the world and to lead a transparent government.” So either the Obama administration, advised by its senior military officers, has badly misunderstood the psychology of anti-Americanism around the world, or there’s more to this story than just military tactics.
In short, this is at least in part about domestic politics. And, ethics to one side for a minute, Obama has got himself into a sticky situation politically. From the outset, the president’s goal has been clear: to steer a middle course on the question of prisoner abuse, winning hearts and minds abroad by firmly repudiating the Bush administration’s conduct, and keeping the political situation stable at home by opposing prosecutions and calling for people to move on and look to the future. Unfortunately, he may be discovering the costly lesson that, on some issues, there just isn’t much middle ground.
By repudiating the torture memos and clarifying the legal situation at Guantánamo (that the Bush administration had worked so hard to muddy), Obama didn't put the issue of torture to bed, but actually strengthened the case for prosecution. Meanwhile, he inflamed the Republican right who waved the bloody shirt, claiming that Obama was risking American soldiers’ lives by damaging the reputation of the nation at a time of war. The same thing would undoubtedly have happened with these photos.
Meanwhile, the president knows that it is politically inconceivable that the originators of this policy – Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush – will end up in the dock: because a Democratic president seeking imprisonment for a Republican predecessor will create a constitutional crisis of a scale that will make the Clinton impeachment look laughable, and almost certainly bring much of the rest of his agenda to a halt. As Philip Gourevitch says in the New Yorker, “When states hold their own leaders to account, it tends to happen not after an election but after a revolution, when the very premise of the ancien régime is treated as criminal.”
For those of us who want to see these criminals prosecuted for ordering their countrymen to torture and abuse detainees, it’s tough to bear in mind the fact that many Republicans see this as playing partisan politics with national security. But Obama's role as president is determined by domestic politics above all other factors. He knows that any attempt to bring senior officials to the dock has the potential to split Washington more deeply even than Watergate.
So, concerned with getting on with his job - winning the war in Afghanistan, disengaging from Iraq and bringing the country out of recession - he desperately wants this issue to go away. It seems he has come to the conclusion that by taking the political hit now, by appearing to be the bad guy to the Democratic faithful, he can finally get the “move on” part going and get on with what he considers to be his real job. A bit of the shine might wear off the halo, but this is the price that has to be paid, he might tell himself. Perhaps his advisers tell him that the public memory for these issues is short, and that once there is no more material for the press to play with, the news cycle will move on.
He may be right, and given the hunt for the middle ground that he's on, he certainly doesn’t seem to have a more sensible political course to take. But of course there are plenty of groups who are going to fight this conclusion in the law courts and the streets and the media - just like the abolitionists did with slavery and the civil rights activists did with segregation. This is a fundamental, constitutional question about the universalism of human rights, and it just may not be possible to duck. After all, “Torture,” as a certain 44th president of the United States said a few days ago, “corrodes the character of a country.”
Not for the first time, but certainly this time without wishing it, Obama seems to be echoing Abraham Lincoln, who had to steer a similar course over slavery in the context of trying to save the union. We're not in civil war territory yet (!), but the process of reaching a solution on this one is going to be deeply damaging to the American polity. It may have to happen anyway. One thing is clear now, though: it’s not going to be the White House that forces America to face up to this thorny matter.
Think Of the Children
50 minutes ago
2 comments:
Excellent post.
"One thing is clear now, though: it's not going to be the White House that forces America to face up to this thorny matter."
Nor, perhaps, should it be. It seems to me that our 3 co-equal branches of government need to regain equilibrium. President Clinton's Attorney General was able to appoint a Special Prosecutor whenever a mop would go missing from the Janitor's broom closet. In contrast, both the D.O.J. and Congress under President Bush's administration operated at times as if they worked exclusively for the president. Ultimately, I think, it is for Congress and the A.G. to force the issue of investigations into this matter, and it would be better if that decision-making process were as public as possible. Our system works best when everyone, including the President, understands what their respective roles and Constitutional duties require. Of course, President Obama, as a former Con Law professor, knows what his role and duty is better than I do, but I really don't think he has jurisdiction over this matter, so to speak. Mine is probably an overly simplistic point of view, but doing the appropriate thing is only "politically sticky" when the politics is focused too much on power, rather than ideals.
it is politically inconceivable that the originators of this policy – Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush – will end up in the dock: because a Democratic president seeking imprisonment for a Republican predecessor will create a constitutional crisis of a scale that will make the Clinton impeachment look laughable,
This is most likely indeed Obama's calculation, but it sounds like a political version of the "too big to fail" argument about General Motors, and a very dangerous one. In essence, it would mean that from now on any president can exceed his authority, subvert the Constitution, commit war crimes, and do more or less anything else he wants, all with impunity, simply because putting an ex-President on trial for such actions would create too much of a political headache later. Of course, there would be some limit to what a President could get away with, but at present we can't know what those limits are; the only thing we've really established is that extramarital oral sex is off limits.
Further, it would demonstrate, both to Americans and to the world, that our rhetoric about everyone being subject to the law is in fact mere rhetoric. All would see that that principle will be set aside -- even at the cost of huge damage to the country's international image, as you point out -- when political expediency requires.
Obama should rise to the occasion. Any President must reckon with the possibility that unforseen contingencies will call his attention away from his preferred agenda.
This is not an impossibile situation to handle. The Republicans impeached Clinton, and he was a sitting President, not a former one. Yes, putting Bush and Cheney on trial (if the evidence justifies that) would send much of the right into hysterics (not that they're too far from that state already), but how much that mattered would depend on how much of the public believed their claims that prosecuting this was just a matter of partisanship. The best vaccine against that problem is the truth -- starting with the release of all the photos.
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