Sat 16 May 2009
Obama is flip-flopping on change message
Posted by Canada / Pat (B/P editor) under Balkers
[20] Comments
Obama started out with great promise. He banned Bush’s torture program and scheduled Guantanamo Bay prison to close. Then he complied with a court ruling to release the Bush memos about the torture, and said he wouldn’t appeal it when the ACLU won again to get the photos released.
Now he has decided to appeal that order and stall the release since his generals think it will jeopardize troops. And he has decided to restart Bush’s prisoner trials at Guantanamo.
Some media here are already saying Obama is backpedaling and not a lot different than Bush was. If he keeps this up he is going to lose the good will that he started with in other nations.
Welcome Pat! There is some coverage in the U.S. around this also.
Some believe that Obama knows the appeal will fail and the photos will be released, and meanwhile he stays on the good side of his generals.
I suppose he has to counterbalance a lot of interests and voices, of course. But I agree with you that the perception of flip-flopping is not smart for him to leave out there. It’s bound to raise questions internationally on his veracity, plus Americans historically will support a president who stands firm on his or her beliefs, even if they have some disagreement with it.
Guantanamo may be a different matter. He was handed a complete mess there from Bush, and there may not be a good answer on how to process and disperse the detainees. It is ugly however and we need to find a way to solve it and get the facility shut down.
I understand that the photos could likely cause aggression against the United States to escalate. I get it.
It still cannot be a reason to negate or lessen the severity of the issue.
The United States prosecuted people in the past who performed the same acts of torture on our own. We are (the president included) obligated by our own law, which is written in accordance with international law, to stand firm and investigate the crimes and prosecute accordingly.
The irony of Obama’s decision to not disclose these photos because they would cause aggression and increase risk to our troops is the same reason that we hold ourselves to a higher moral standard.
Although I supported Ron Paul..I voted as much against McCain because he sought to only continue Bush’s failed policies, and for Obama because of his philosophies on the same important critical core issues.
I understand the staggering task and cost concerning the economy..the uphill fight in regards to healthcare reform and education, etc., but turning a blind eye to this issue of torture and sidestepping the law is reprehensible. I urge every American to call or write their congressman to speak up about this outrage and travesty of justice.
Well, I’m glad somebody in D.C. straightened him out. He’s still too immature for the job though. The fact that he saw no downside to releasing the photos proves that.
If this is as they say a Republic founded on the idea of representative government, then we, whom are the represented, have a legal right and moral obligation to see what is done in our name by our Representatives. If they can not reveal their actions and stand behind them in the light of day, then they have abrogated the contract between the elected and the electorate. If they chose to stand with the torturors and hide their evil actions, then it should not be in my name or yours, but it all comes down to having a conscience.
Not only that Raven, but the memos and pictures are in fact the property of the citizens of the U.S.
Baring a clear classified-information need involving harm to national security, our government has no right to keep it’s documents, policies or actions secret. In this case, the policy is already known and some photos have already come out. To claim this batch will be what enflames gihadist, whom right now are more docile towards our troops, borders on the absurd IMO.
It appears these abuse photos will be making the light of day at some point, and then I believe for those Americans still duped by the propaganda of the far right (that interrogation practices like waterboarding are safe, OK and necessary), will start to see it for the unhinged and despicable policy that it is.
That is one good reason why these need to come out. It will wake up those of us who don’t currently get it.
To EJ;
I suspect the downside you mentioned, is pure hype put out by Dick Cheney. Of course he doesn’t want this coming out, if it’s proof positive that higher ups like him committed crimes in office!
It’s amazing the degree to which Cheney’s bald-faced propaganda interviews in defense of the policy, are even aired as serious discourse. Attn Dick: torture is illegal and immoral. Your turn…
If one wants to see how he & other Bush Regime principals jobbed the late Tim Russert’s program Meet The Press, as well as got almost the entire rest of the “liberal” mainstream U.S. media to simply cheerlead the Iraq invasion instead of independently analyzing very shaky information fed to them, see this Bill Moyer’s PBS docunentary link. You can watch it on a broadband connection;
Buying The War
Obama will take it to the U.S. Supreme Court. He will drag this thing out as long as possible. Right now the Supreme Court is a conservative court. They may agree with Obama.
Because the pictures are just the tip of the iceberg–and maybe he wants to avoid opening up one gigantic can of worms. Imagine the stuff that went on that was never written down or photographed. In the long run, though, I think that anyone who has really broken the law should answer for it–regardless of party or political position. That is just on general principles.
I’m losing track now of who is brand new on B/P, so if you are – welcome aboard!
By Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh
Special to CNN
Editor’s note: Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh are attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union and co-authors of “Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond”. Jaffer is counsel to the plaintiffs in ACLU v. Department of Defense, a lawsuit that has forced the release of more than 100,000 pages of government documents concerning the abuse of prisoners. Singh is lead counsel in the suit seeking disclosure of photographs of U.S. personnel abusing prisoners at overseas locations. Jameel Jaffer says the courts have ruled that refusal to disclose the abuse photos was unlawful.
(CNN) — Last week President Obama announced that he would suppress prisoner abuse photographs that he earlier said he would release. Given the president’s stated commitment to government transparency, this reversal was both surprising and profoundly disappointing.
The ACLU has sought release of these photos for almost six years. In October 2003, we filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act for records — including photographs — relating to the abuse of prisoners in U.S. detention facilities overseas.
In 2005, a federal judge in New York ruled that the Bush administration’s refusal to disclose the photographs was unlawful, and in 2008 a federal appeals court unanimously affirmed that decision. The Bush administration continued to suppress the photos, and now President Obama has vowed to do the same.
The photos are a critical part of the historical record. The government has acknowledged that they depict prisoner abuse at locations other than Abu Ghraib, and it’s clear that the photos would provide irrefutable evidence that abuse was widespread and systemic.
The photos would also shed light on the connection between the abuse and the decisions of high-level Bush administration officials. As the district court recognized, the photos are “the best evidence of what happened.”
In explaining his change of heart, President Obama said that the release of the photos “would not add any additional benefit” to the ongoing public debate about the abuse of prisoners. But the ongoing public debate is rife with false claims, and the photos would expose the truth.
The Bush administration told the public that abuse was aberrational and isolated, and many media organizations adopted this fraudulent narrative as their own. But even President Obama, in explaining his reversal, perpetuated the myth that the abuse of prisoners “was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals.”
President Obama’s statement was meant to explain why the photos would not inform the public debate, but it only underscored why the release of the photographs is so important. Many Americans still believe that abuse took place in spite of policy rather than because of it.
The truth is that senior officials authorized the use of barbaric interrogation methods that the U.S. once prosecuted as war crimes, and even abuse that was not expressly authorized was traceable to a climate in which abuse was tolerated and often encouraged. The photos would help tell this story.
President Obama’s other rationale for suppressing the photographs is that they would “inflame anti-American opinion and put our troops in greater danger,” an argument that was repeatedly rejected by the courts when made by the Bush administration.
Nobody, of course, wants to see anyone get hurt by the release of this or any other information. But the fundamental problem with the government’s argument is that it lacks a limiting principle.
Any photograph of prisoner abuse, civilian casualties in Afghanistan, or U.S. military operations in Iraq could be used to “inflame anti-American opinion”; indeed, the same is true of any news article that discusses (for example) torture, Guantanamo, or the CIA’s secret prisons.
To give the government the power to suppress information because it might anger an unidentified set of people in an unspecified part of the world and ultimately endanger an ill-defined group of U.S. personnel would be to invest it with a virtually unlimited censorial power. And by investing it with such power, we would effectively be affording the greatest protection from disclosure to records that depict the worst kinds of government misconduct.
President Obama has inherited a legacy of lawlessness and abuse, and it’s not easy to untangle that. But the idea that suppressing the photographs will help the country turn the page on the last eight years is misguided.
We cannot make a clean break with the past until the public knows what happened in the detention centers and why. Blinding ourselves to the ugly consequences of the Bush administration’s policies only deprives us of the opportunity to learn from recent history. And if we fail to learn from this history, we are bound to repeat it.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh.
© 2009 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved
GOP Logic; We got valuable information from water boarding + Pelosi was briefed = Water Boarding is Legal!!
GOP Logic / Waterboarding is safe, legal and moral, but Pelosi is guilty for not objecting!
;^)
This torture shit is absurd! We , the US, are supposed to be fighting a war about values, yet we export weapons all over the world. And we kill and imprison people , when does this madness end?
Welcome back Sam. I find the torture “debate” absurd. The so called “liberal” U.S. media, runs it in the voice of Cheney and others as if it’s at all legitimate. It’s illegal, period.
It’s like O.J. Simpson getting let off for using a gun to hold people against their will, because he needed to do it to get his memorabilia back. He was not let off, and there was no debate about his methodology…
Sam said “This torture shit is absurd! We , the US, are supposed to be fighting a war about values, yet we export weapons all over the world. And we kill and imprison people , when does this madness end?”
I think the best comment I heard during the invasion/occupation of Iraq was a cartoon in which Bush and Blair were holding a bunch of papers and saying, “How do we know Sadam has weapons of mass destruction? Because we still have the sales receipts!”
United States Of America/ The best of all Free nations on the planet. Other countries are today buying there way into our system, not to help the people here, but to slowly implant of there own Faceist Laws into ours, as a breeding ground. For the paper Dragon. The Paper Dragon that must not have such rules against a goverment.Ones that speak of Liberity and Freedom of Speech. Or Free Press. And how would one go AROUND the in place system. Create a new one. Czars is one way. 32 now. What I wanted in a president is change yes. I was fooled and will not be fooled again. A Liberal to the Obama is a Republican who woke up, and saw his mistake. No new Taxes, maybe not. Taxes are only for the rich. BUT I CAN SURE AS HELL RAISE EVERY FEE ON EVERYONE OF THEM, reguardless of income. Impeach The Obama.
Welcome RW Kent. I’m afraid that while the GOP was in power for 20
of the last 28 years, they turned America the Great into America the
2nd Rate… ;^)
Actually, we don’t know if Obama has abandoned the torture program, or merely outsourced it in other places. He certainly loves to kill people and incite terrorism, and put all US citizens on shaky legal ground throughout the world.
Welcome rp. Did you ever think the war in Afghanistan was justified, say fall of 2001?