Obama And Torture: The Record Gets Worse: http://t.co/V2yrDyBQGH via @DishFeed
— Stephen Walt (@stephenWalt) October 17, 2014
The topic deserves more attention than a Saturday-night drive-by, but I wanted to share my irk. As the McClatchy news bureau sees it:
A soon-to-be released Senate report on the CIA doesn’t assess the responsibility of former President George W. Bush or his top aides for any of the abuses of the agency’s detention and interrogation program, avoiding a full public accounting of one of the darkest chapters of the war on terror.
“This report is not about the White House. It’s not about the president. It’s not about criminal liability. It’s about the CIA’s actions or inactions,” said a person familiar with the document, who asked not to be further identified because the executive summary – the only part to that will be made public – still is in the final stages of declassification.
The Senate Intelligence Committee report also didn’t examine the responsibility of top Bush administration lawyers in crafting the legal framework that permitted the CIA to use simulated drowning called waterboarding and other interrogation methods widely described as torture, McClatchy has learned…
As a result, the $40 million, five-year inquiry passed up what may be the final opportunity to render an official verdict on the culpability of Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior officials for the program, in which suspected terrorists were abducted, sent to secret overseas prisons, and subjected to the harsh interrogation techniques.
“If it’s the case that the report doesn’t really delve into the White House role, then that’s a pretty serious indictment of the report,” said Elizabeth Goitein, the co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program at the New York University Law School. “Ideally it should come to some sort of conclusions on whether there were legal violations and if so, who was responsible.”
At the same time, she said, the report still is critically important because it will give “the public facts even if it doesn’t come to these conclusions. The reason we have this factual accounting is not for prurient interest. It’s so we can avoid something like this ever happening again in the future.”…
“As an oversight document the main premise is about whether Congress was accurately and appropriately informed by the CIA,” said the person familiar with the report, one of several knowledgable sources who spoke to McClatchy. “The report will show that the CIA did not provide accurate information, and in some cases provided misleading information.”
The narrow parameters of the inquiry apparently were structured to secure the support of the committee’s minority Republicans. But the Republicans withdrew only months into the inquiry, and several experts said that the parameters were sufficiently flexible to have allowed an examination of the roles Bush, Cheney and other top administration officials played in a top-secret program that could only have been ordered by the president…
As Andrew Sullivan chooses to interpret McClatchey:
… We don’t have merely passive indifference to the CIA’s record on torture, we have active opposition to the entire inquiry from the very beginning of Obama’s term in office. If you want to know why we are still waiting for the report almost two years since it was finished, and if you want to know why the White House refused to provide mountains of internal documents that would have added to the report’s factual inquiries, just absorb the anecdote above. And if you want to know why the White House did nothing to discipline the CIA after it hacked into the Senate Committee’s own computers, ditto. It’s impossible not to conclude that Obama wants as little of this material made public as possible. His pledge for the most transparent administration in history ends, it seems, at Langley…
Yesterday’s McClatchy story leads with the notion that the report does not follow the trail of responsibility up to Bush, Cheney, Tenet, Rumsfeld et al, and is thereby somehow toothless. But the committee was an investigation specifically into the CIA’s records on the program, to get a full accounting of what happened within that agency. It was not tasked with the essentially political job of holding the White House responsible. And it may be, in fact, that even some of the most powerful individuals in the Bush administration were actually unaware of what was really going on, or that they were merely repeating what the CIA was telling them, and the CIA was lying to cover its ass. That does not minimize the political responsibility of president Bush and others for presiding over such a grotesque torture program; but it’s essential context for understanding what actually happened…
Sully — it’s an active verb!
Betty Cracker
Oops — I squashed your thread. Feel free to delete mine. I’m on my mobile and can’t figure out how! Sorry!
ETA: Nevermind…figured it out!
steve from Antioch
Sullivan has a pretty consistent history of the past decade of condemning the United State’s torture program.
Its unclear what point you are trying to make, but if it is that Sullivan is attempting to excuse the Bush administration higher ups, you’re mistaken.
jl
@steve from Antioch: So people like Cheney and Rummy initiated the program, were all with the ‘take the gloves off’ approach, but somehow were ‘not aware’ of what was really going on.
Sullivan seems to saying that. I find that logic hard to follow.
Obama has been going with ‘look forward not back’ approach. Sort of like Ford, but Obama is not part of the club and never will be (edit: DemocRAT and not 110 percent white like us), or has that not really sunk in with him?
He thinks others will do the same favor for him? Really?
Anne Laurie
@steve from Antioch: How is Sullivan’s “And it may be, in fact, that even some of the most powerful individuals in the Bush administration were actually unaware of what was really going on, or that they were merely repeating what the CIA was telling them” not “attempting to excuse the Bush administration higher ups”?
Sullivan, once it became unpopular in the higher social circles to defend torture, ditched his “fifth columnist” attacks on anti-Iraq-war protestors and switched to insisting that the Bush Administration had been cruelly misled by Saddam, or the Europeans, or the “beltway bureaucracy”, or… well, anybody who wasn’t on Sullivan’s team. Declaiming that President Obama is somehow responsible for what the previous Republican administration did is just one step lower on his campaign to erase all public memory of the 2001-2008 Reign of (T)Error.
srv
There’s something fucked up about this.
I’m sure it will be just a footnote in David Attingtons wiki
jl
@Anne Laurie: It would very odd, illogical and frankly absurd to find excuses for torture under the Cheney regime (particularly for the bigshots) but find reasons to pound Obama on the very same issue.
I think any reasonable person could see that is a legitimate position to take, that it would nonsense and ridiculous. A cynical person might say it was a fetid and rank hypocrisy, but a nice excuse for bigots and rabid ruthless partisans to make wreak destruction.
So, such a thing surely would never happen in his modern age of reason, would it? I mean, pundits would not be allowed to get away with such grotesque vile behavior. Would they?
Tenar Darell
OT What the heck is happening in Keane NH?
Frankensteinbeck
From the quoted segments above, I thought this was the most offensively mistitled article ever. Having followed the link and actually read it, the main point of the article seems to be that Obama didn’t prosecute Bush/Cheney, and he heard from some guy that Obama was all swearing and angry about the CIA investigation, so Obama must love torture. He’s seriously trying to shuffle the blame for Bush’s torture policy onto Obama.
Gin & Tonic
@Tenar Darell: It’s Keene Pumpkin Festival. It’s a drinking festival at a drinking college.
Tenar Darell
Whoah, it’s Keene State an d really rowdy students. Article has little explanation of why over the top police response.
Gin & Tonic
@Tenar Darell: Hey, you have one of these, you gotta use it.
Linnaeus
The CIA – and I’d say this applies to any component of the US intelligence community – doesn’t do anything without someone in the White House knowing about it.
Mike J
@Tenar Darell: Believe me, I’ve tried to have a rowdy weekend in Keene, and I couldn’t find one. The article doesn’t say anything about why the cops went nutso and started firing on children.
Cervantes
@Tenar Darell: CH3CH2OH
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@Frankensteinbeck: It only works if you’re dealing with morons.
Oh crap.
Mandalay
@jl:
Mandalay
@Anne Laurie:
Heh. The quote you offer to show that Sullivan was “attempting to excuse the Bush administration higher ups” very carefully excludes his sentence which follows your quote, which explicitly does not excuse them:
Do you even read those acres of block quotes you post?
Mandalay
.
mai naem
My evil twin Yoyo Naem has been popping up and wishing ebola on a few select people. Actually it started as a few select but there’s a new person added to the list every few hours. Not good. Not good at all.
BillinGlendaleCA
@efgoldman: They’re still running against the New Deal.
Violet
@BillinGlendaleCA: I thought they had turned Lincoln into a Democrat and were blaming him for the Civil War and freeing the slaves.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Violet: They’ve never stopped running against Thomas Jefferson, either, also too.
Cheers,
Scott.
Jewish Steel
@Tenar Darell: Some of my mates live there and teach at Keene St. Fucking bananas.
GregB
I have heard firsthand that regional SWAT teams are still pouring in to Keene.
This is all obviously Obama’s fault.
Jewish Steel
From Keene:
http://youtu.be/4MXe09DSCWc
Mike J
Didja read this from Keene?
http://ban.jo/News/US-Canada/20141018/Riots-Break-Out-At-Keene-State-College-Keene/
One tweet there says 5 dead, but one tweet is not something to believe.
Mike J
I heard pumpkins can carry ebola even when they show no sign of it themselves.
Mike J
@efgoldman: Nor did WBZ, which I also checked.
Damn you adding on after I replied.
Tenar Darell
@Jewish Steel: Sounds like an off the hook all weekend party. Then the riot cops came. Hope your friends are okay and don’t have any damage.
mclaren
Aw, c’mon, Anne! It’s not like Obama didn’t send anyone to prison for the CIA torture scandal.
Obama and his wonderful Attorney General Eric Holder sent John Kiriakou to prison…for revealing that the CIA tortured people. Kiriakou was indicted under the 1917 Espionage Act.
Source: This CIA Agent Spoke Out About Torture. Now’s He’s in Prison for Espionage, 20 August 2013.
Oh, and by the way — President Obama, that glorious beacon of progressive values, never stopped the process of torturing prisoners. It continues to this day, with Obama’s approval. And of course the implicit approval of his marvelous Attorney General, that paragon of justice, Eric Holder.
Yay! Hope and change™! We are the ones we have been waiting for!
…Yeah, to torture people without even charging them with a crime and blow up innocent women and children in wedding parties in countries we’re not at war with.
Jewish Steel
@efgoldman: It doesn’t seem very New England. Then again, you guys did start that revolution.
Mike J
@Jewish Steel:
You cram a buncha religious fanatics in a tiny area and that’s what happens.
mclaren
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Don’t you realize soup kitchens caused the Great Depression?
Von Mises said so! Friedrich Hayek said so! It must be true!
Jewish Steel
@Mike J: It’s hard to reconcile religious fanaticism with the Pepperidge Farm New Englander I carry in my box of regional stereotypes.
@efgoldman: My friend in Keene said, “And the Red Sox didn’t even win anything!”
Mike J
@Jewish Steel:
The fanaticism comes about when people don’t act the same. Differences are not tolerated, as far back as you care to go.
Jewish Steel
@efgoldman: Ha! As Texasy as GWB.
Tommy
@efgoldman: I think colleges just have a tradition on drinking. I went to college at Western Ilinois University. Playboy ranked it as a top “party” school. Things went down there.
Mike J
@efgoldman: I got busted for drinking underage, but I was out and on the air playing songs about cops that night.
pseudonymous in nc
Executive branch’s gonna branch. Alas.
Also: there may be whiter places in America than Keene, NH, but I have yet to visit them.
Skerry
Post-football rioting going on in Morgantown. Tear gas and rubber bullets fired at students burning couches.
pseudonymous in nc
To be more verbose about the post topic: you don’t have to be an Alex Jones type to appreciate that there are bits of American government that self-perpetuate regardless of which elected officials have constitutional authority over them. That little corner office of the Pentagon that cooked up a cushy deal for AK-47 silencers under the black budget? A pissy little bit of the deep state.
The fertilizer for the deep state is an unwillingness to come down on past executive (and legislative) actions like a ton of bricks — the bullshit decorum of elected institutions. The convention about “respect for the office of the president” that makes it possible for Nixon to get a pardon and for Obama to show up at ceremonials with Junior Bush, or the cult of seniority in Congress and the aura of privilege that comes with Intel Committee postings? All of that allows the CIA to do whatever the fuck it likes as long as the timestamps are filed on the right timesheet.
Tenar Darell
@Jewish Steel:
Your friend mentioning that thing about the Red Sox made me laugh.
@efgoldman:
Yeah, chicken-egg is correct. I’ve known people that mentioned having fun dropping stuff off the UMass campus central tower during parties. And hundreds or thousands of drunk students is a scary thing. They really can just turn nasty at the drop of a hat. This is not unusual at certain events, like you mentioned.
The phenomenon of escalating force and how it effects crowd control is interesting. These things seem to follow a pattern, where the very presence of armored cops can create a violent feedback loop with the crowds. (The police chief in Seattle during the WTO demonstrations has talked about how police behavior can actually incite the crowd. I think he even recommended some things that were used briefly in Ferguson).
pseudonymous in nc
But back to White People Go Riot: Keene got itself an anti-terrorism BearCat from the Homeland Security budget, specifically citing the Pumpkin Festival as a target, while Morgantown… I dunno.
Skerry
Those college kids are no angels.
Villago Delenda Est
And it may be that I am Marie of Romania.
Jewish Steel
@efgoldman:
Istud vinum, bonum vinum,
vinum generosum,
reddit virum curialem,
probum, animosum.
Per your mead comment. From Carmina Burana.
TS
Funny how President Obama is responsible for EVERY last thing that has happened in the US – and overseas – for the past 6 years – but GWB – well he didn’t know about it – not his fault.
White Guy – can do no wrong in the eyes of the US media
sharl
Twitter is having a grand old time with the Keene NH
violent black street thugsmischievous and rowdy white boys. A few selections from among the tweets with the hashtag #pumpkinfest:Regarding that last tweet, John Oliver talked about that surplus military acquisition by Keene back in August – something called a “Bearcat”. In fact, in their application, Keene officials cited possible terrorism at their annual Pumpkin Festival as a reason for the need. But frisky white boys are incapable of doing terrorism, of course, so this doesn’t count.
Finally, there is some question as to whether some recently arrived libertarian activists might have played a role in all this (those annoying folks are described in some detail in this May NYT article). So far I’ve only seen speculation, but no hard evidence. Wouldn’t be surprising though.
Keith G
@Frankensteinbeck: The headline is a bit over the top (probably in order to be a click magnet) and I would not have written it in that way, but is that headline really that bad? Let’s look at an argument for mitigation.
Mr Brown got shot in Ferguson. The local district attorney did not shoot Mr Brown. If the district attorney is allowing the cop who shot Mr Brown to get off very lightly, that is making that completely horrible situation even worse.
For me the question would be has President Obama done all that he morally and legally could to see that justice was applied to those who tortured and those who approved the torture?
At this point, I don’t have enough information to answer that question, but there are non-Sully sources who are generally supportive of the President and who I trust who are not happy with the president’s actions on this issue.
Keith G
@TS: You and I must be paying attention to different media. That is certainly not the messaging has that I am hearing.
Baud
@Keith G:
I’m disappointed in how torture was handled, but the headline is pretty bad. And when the report is issued, it’ll be all about Obama and absolutely no condemnation will be made of the Bush people.
Cervantes
@Keith G: Obama was told early on that if he wanted any cooperation whatsoever from the agencies, even unto dispatching bin Laden, he’d have to protect them first. That’s what he’s done. Would he have taken that approach, anyway? Can’t say. Was it a good decision? Can’t say. Did the deal stick or are the agencies doing their own thing as opposed to cooperating? Can’t say. Is he comfortable with the deal now after six years? Can’t say.
“Morally and legally”? Answer to both would appear to be “No.” It’s the political dimension and aforementioned practical considerations that fuzzy up the picture.
Baud
@Cervantes:
One need look no further than the current ebola panic to see how people would react if a foreign terrorist attack occurred during Obama’s watch. Americans would not rally around Obama the way we rallied around Bush after 9/11.
Ramalama
@Tommy: One of my sisters went there (WIU) ….and became born again. I never connected the two together but now have to think more about this.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@mclaren: Well by gum, this would have never have happened if McCain or Romney were president and we can be sure the US goverment won’t be doing torture when Raynd Paul is president!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Jewish Steel:
You do realize New England was settled by people who considered Cromwell’s England to permissive?
Omnes Omnibus
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Actually, it was largely settled by the exact type of people who constituted Cromwell’s England.
Cervantes
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: “We’re just as bad as all the others” may be unusually honest but it’s hardly a moral argument.
Frankensteinbeck
@Cervantes:
I dispute this. Torture came straight from Bush and Cheney. There is no meaningful way to prosecute it without going after them – and it can’t be done. Congress made it absolutely plain that they were on Bush and Cheney’s side on this. Like, 92-8 senate votes on Bush and Cheney’s side. Judicially, a president prosecuting his predecessor on anything is a legal grey area that goes straight to the Supreme Court. Which is more likely, that SCOTUS would convict Bush Lite and the Dark Lord of anything whatsoever, or that they would officially make torture and everything else that administration did legal for all time?
And speaking of legal for all time, congress did go back and retroactively declare it all legal, although I don’t think going forward – just in Bush’s case.
Plus, we’d have lost everything Obama has accomplished. How do you think the Blue Dogs we were barely able to corral would have reacted? Would he have won reelection, whether the prosecution succeeded or failed? Would it have changed anything going forward, since all that shit was illegal anyway and assholes like Cheney don’t care and think they’re different?
Yes, he did all that was legally possible, and morally the best option available. Getting SCOTUS involved would have been a step backwards morally. A big one.
Jewish Steel
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
@Omnes Omnibus:
I hear the Vikinings come from Scandanavia. But who could believe that?
Gene108
@Frankensteinbeck:
You forgot tit-for-tat mindset of Republicans.
They went after Clinton’s personal life and a past financial business venture because they wanted payback for Watergate and Iran-Contra, and in they succeeded because in the minds of many voters Clinton became as corrupt as Nixon and had as much disregard for the law as the clown car of Reagab-Bush,Sr. flunkies involved with Iran-Contra.
If Obama prosecuted Bush&Co the next Republican President will leave no stone unturned to throw Obama in jail, on any charges real or imagined.
I do not want, the relatively young, President Obama spending his post-Presidency on legal defense for Benhgazi, IRS “scandal”, the Obama’s Christmas card mailing list, etc.
Origuy
@Omnes Omnibus: A lot of New England settlers went back to fight for Cromwell’s army.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Gene108: Yup.
Don’t forget that Nancy said impeaching or prosecuting Bush wasn’t going to happen, either. Yet somehow his refusing to rush ahead and try it shows how corrupt Barack
BushObama is, or something.(sigh)
Cheers,
Scott.
salvage
Bush is no longer President, Obama is and like drones the torture has gone on.
The only difference is that suddenly a bunch of Democrats who yelled about it when Bush was doing it have turned “Serious” and the area has gotten all grey.
For Americans if the person you voted for did it, it’s not that bad.
Citizen Alan
I understand that it was politically impossible for Obama to prosecute the Bushies for their crimes. That doesn’t alter the fact, however, that by acknowledging that impossibility, Obama has ensured that there will be no accountability ever for any degree of Republican malfeasance. The history of America for literally my entire life (I was born seven months after Nixon’s first inauguration) has consisted of Republicans committing monstrous crimes that the Democrats refuse to prosecute or even talk about because “it would be bad for the country and undermine faith in the government.” The next Republican president will do everything Bush did and ten times worse, and future Democrats won’t do anything to prosecute him either.
VFX Lurker
@TS:
That particular White Guy is also barely present in the eyes of the US media. I regularly see former Presidents Carter and Clinton in the news, but barely a peep about former President George W. Bush. It’s like he’s being swept under the rug.
Mike G
@Gene108:
What do you mean, “if”?
Fixed it for you.
I’m sure the Repukes will spend the rest of Obama’s life trying to ruin him through the courts for anything from Benghazi to birth certificates to the Peloponnesian Wars. Repukes have no shame and no mercy, and holding back from prosecuting them for real crimes just emboldens them to work even harder to persecute Dems for imaginary ones.
Another Holocene Human
@efgoldman: William Weld, the WASP guv of the 90s (who unsuccessfully pulled “Do you know who I am?” on a NY state trooper when he got pulled over for speeding while in office) declined to fund the state university system in Massachusetts because Massachusetts has such fine private schools.
In return, the blue collar Catholic families effected by this
marched for justicecontinue to live down to every stereotype of Catholics, ever. I think it’s getting old.(I am Catholic but my parents were midwestern Catholic and my dad had a job that required a college degree, so I was very happy to go to public school with Jews instead of the yobs.)
Kyle
@VFX Lurker:
He’s under that rug sleeping off his latest bender.
GW Bush has reverted to equilibrium and become as unremarkable and bereft of personal achievements as he really always was — in the absence of being propped up by his family’s money and connections, and the fevered dreams of Repuke rubes hungry for a name-recognition-and-little-else empty suit savior for their diseased ideology.
His only public act has been making paintings fit for art therapy day at a psych ward.
Cervantes
@Frankensteinbeck:
It would be the height of stupidity to begin by trying to prosecute the highest-ups. No sensible prosecutor would begin that way.
Cervantes
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
Sighing becomes you.
Anyhow, it would be the height of stupidity to begin by trying to prosecute the highest-ups. No sensible prosecutor would begin that way.
Bill Arnold
@Cervantes:
The closest I can find in the press (in a brief google search) is Seven CIA Directors Ask Obama to Stop Criminal Probe. What else was in the press, out of curiosity?
Bill Arnold
@efgoldman:
This is at least possible, as an youthful, irresponsible exercise of his well-known weather-control powers.
(The conspiracy theories about Hurricane Sandy mostly suggest that Obama used HARP to magnify Sandy and steer it into New Jersey to win reelection. Boring. )
Chris
@Linnaeus:
It’s been pissing me off for a decade now that the entire Iraq WMD fiasco’s been discussed in the mainstream as an “intelligence failure,” or, in other words, dumped all the Bush administration’s responsibility onto the CIA. It’s not their fault – all they wanted was impartial and real information, but that damn CIA tricked them into invading, or at least wasn’t zealous enough in giving them the real information!
Forget the Bushies actually ordering Tenet to say in public that his agency’s analysis confirmed what Bush & co were telling the public. Forget Rumsfeld setting up his own parallel CIAs and stacking them with cronies to make sure he got exactly the information he wanted to hear. Forget the CIA officer whose cover was leaked to the public in retaliation for her husband not returning with the news they wanted. Nope, it was all just an “intelligence failure,” not, you know, the intelligence agencies being ordered to report on something whether it was there or not, or the administration failing to tell the public what the agencies were actually reporting, or anything of that kind.
Apparently, Sully’s decided that if the CIA’s going to be blamed for the WMD fiasco, they might as well be blamed for torture as well. All those prominent Republicans getting in our faces to tell us that torture was good and we were letting the terrorists win if we said otherwise? Never happened!
Chris
@VFX Lurker:
I hate to pass up an opportunity to blame the MSM, but I think in that case it’s in large part because Bush has stayed out of the public eye more. Carter, as the saying goes, has been a much more effective post-president than president, and has stayed very much in the public eye through his own effort. Clinton, if nothing else, stays in the public eye by association with his wife’s activities and political campaigns. Bush has been comparatively quiet. By far the best course for him, given his approval rating when he left office, and probably best for his party as well.
Cervantes
@Chris: The only thing I would add — and it’s almost a caveat but not quite — has to do with Tenet’s personality, or maybe his modus operandi. He’s not a particularly bright lad. His startling progress from Senate staffer to DCI was a testament to his penchant for, as someone observed, figuring out what his superiors wanted to hear and then being the one to say it to them.
Cervantes
@Chris: Yes, but I don’t think that lets the media off the hook. Odious crimes were committed in (and directed from) the Bush/Cheney White House. Some journalists and their sources have risked and lost a lot to inform us. Other journalists, never eager to expose those crimes, now act as if Bush’s decision to hide is a reason to pretend they never occurred.