If Obama Cedes Ground on Torture to Cheney, We'll All Pay a Heavy Price

If Obama Cedes Ground on Torture to Cheney, We'll All Pay a Heavy Price

By acknowledging recent crimes while refusing to pursue the criminals, the president has made his position untenable
by Gary Younge

'Every government ­assumes deeds and ­misdeeds of the past," writes Hannah Arendt in Eichmann and the Holocaust. "It means hardly more, generally speaking, than that every generation, by virtue of being born into a historical continuum, is burdened by the sins of the fathers as it is blessed with the deeds of the ancestors."

For Barack Obama this cuts both ways. Talented as he is, he looks much more so when compared with the man who preceded him. Just by showing up and stringing a few coherent sentences together, he embodies an improvement. To earn acclaim in these early months, he hasn't had to do anything good. He merely had to announce that he would stop doing things that were bad.

On the other hand, he has inherited the scarred landscape of his predecessor's tenure. Bush's wars, banks, car companies, secret prisons and untried prisoners are now his. As the candidate he may have promised change, but as the president he must also simulate some sense of continuity. Soaring ­rhetoric, however hopeful about the future, cannot erase the past, which has a habit of remaining with us.

Herein lies the tension in Obama's deeply flawed attempts to come to terms with America's recent disgraceful record of torture and detainment. As a candidate he was consistent on two points. First, he was opposed to torture and would close Guantánamo Bay. "I believe that we must reject torture ­without equivocation because it does not make us safe, it results in unreliable intelligence, it puts our troops at risk, and it contradicts core American ­values." Second, he had no desire to prosecute those who have been guilty of human rights abuses. "I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of the Republicans as a partisan witch-hunt, because I think we've got too many problems to solve."

In short, by acknowledging the crimes while refusing to pursue the criminals he has promised to rectify America's grim recent history without ever ­reckoning with it.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/05/25-0

especially not since someone has come forward and says that he's read the documents Cheney wants declassifed and his contention that they exonerate him is bogus. Not that I expected anything different--Cheney DOES have a credibility problem, you know.

:headbang:
rocktivity

If Obama doesn't take severe action against torture then the repukes will see that as a sign of weakness.

...on that matter. As in, even though it benefits them to have him play ball, they'll still hold it against him as a "weakness" a few yrs down the line when most Americans will have completely forgotten there was ever a "policy debate" re war crimes.

It isn't until the writer says "on the other hand" that he accepts reality that campaigning isn't governing. Just like you can look at a house over and over, but not really know its kinks until you move in, such could be said of the entire "War on Terror" mess President Obama has inherited. He was warned, we were warned by booshie that this mess would go on for years cause his regime made that the case.

Closing Gitmo doesn't address the problem of the detention fiasco...whose a threat and who isn't, who should be tried and who should be released and then to see if a case can be brought. This long overdue process has just begun. The full extent of the torture and other violations of the Constitution and international law are still coming forward...legislators who have the power to push for investigations are sitting on their hands hoping Obama does the heavy lifting for them. It's as if the same people who were so critical of the past regime for its unitary executive want similar powers used to fix the abuses.

The Executive never presses the abuses of its own branch..that's the responsibility of the Legislative. They can order the DOJ to prosecute or refer cases to other venues (like the World Court). While President Obama can issue orders, we're already seeing how he needs Congressional approval and still faces a public and body politic that has a soft middle between "being safe" and accepting torture and illegal detentions as justified.

We need to push Congress to move forward with bringing forth evidence of law breaking...add to the growing list of hard evidence of real crimes that the spinners can't refute and will push public opinion and thus politicians towards demanding accountability. It may take time, but eventually that accounting has and will take place.

That's their pattern, so I always take their columns with a grain of salt.

Our nation will be judged very harshly by history if Obama lets the Bush administration get away with it.

We will be judged now by every other nation in the world.

Who else is going to write the world's history if our government insists on looking the other way?

to expect him to do the right thing is to be disappointed

Obama is a politician.