Day after tomorrow will be one month since Obama took office.
A month. It’s early yet, and as watchful citizens, we can almost still keep track (as much as is possible from our outside vantage point) of the balls in the air: economy writ large as well as industry-specific, Social Security and other entitlements, health care, energy, and of course, the war(s).
Which is why I get, in theory, the let’s-not-waste-time-and-momentum-on-looking-backward thing. I do and I realize wholesale investigation and prosecution of Bushco et al is a mind-bendingly ginormous undertaking that could subsume not just the Executive, the Judicial, the Legislative, but also you and me and our pets. I get that and I’m as pragmatic as [at least half of] most folks.
I still don’t get, however (and I’m not going to shut up, moreover), how we can be expected to swallow the failure to investigate and prosecute torture. Closing Gitmo=good. Trying to wrap judicial minds around what we now do with detainees=sort of good, if we’re actually doing that. Stating intent to not investigate/prosecute low-level functionaries=debatable but not entirely the worst thing. With me so far?Okay then, no surprise that I agree that lack of investigation/review/prosecution of Administration officials responsible for torture policies and practice=bad. Very much so.
But how naive of me to have thought that would be the worst of it. How naive of me to not have believed earlier hints that our new president might actually carry on some of the worst of the worst (and that’s saying a whole lot right there) of the Bushco Regime’s Patently Unsuccessful Practices in the Dark Arts of Enhanced Interrogation.
Charlie Savage in the NYTimes:
the nominee for C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta,
opened a loophole in Mr. Obama’s interrogation restrictions. At his
hearing, Mr. Panetta said that if the approved techniques were “not
sufficient” to get a detainee to divulge details he was suspected of
knowing about an imminent attack, he would ask for “additional
authority.”
<…>
Mr. Panetta also said the C.I.A. might continue its“extraordinary rendition”
program, under which agents seize terrorism suspects and take them to
other countries without extradition proceedings, in a more sweeping
form than anticipated.
Before the Bush administration, the
program primarily involved taking indicted suspects to their native
countries for legal proceedings. While some detainees in the 1990s were
allegedly abused after transfer, under Mr. Bush the program expanded
and included transfers to third countries — some of which allegedly
used torture — for interrogation, not trials.
Mr. Panetta said
the agency is likely to continue to transfer detainees to third
countries and would rely on diplomatic assurances of good treatment —
the same safeguard the Bush administration used, and that critics say
is ineffective.
First of all, allegedly?Really?
Secondly, relying on “diplomatic assurances of good treatment” implies that the US is trading with legitimate diplomatic currency, but how exactly doesthat work when, with the other hand we are devaluing that currency, and the lofty idea of returning to our former international prestige, by continuing on with some of the same outlaw Bushco practices?
During her confirmation hearing last week, Elena Kagan,
the nominee for solicitor general, said that someone suspected of
helping finance Al Qaeda should be subject to battlefield law —
indefinite detention without a trial — even if he were captured in a
place like the Philippines rather than in a physical battle zone.
Ms. Kagan’s support for an elastic interpretation of the “battlefield” amplified remarks that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.
made at his own confirmation hearing. And it dovetailed with a core
Bush position. Civil liberties groups argue that people captured away
from combat zones should go to prison only after trials.
Continue reading ““Powerful people with powerful allies””
