Terrorism

This Isn’t Yours

Hey, Mr. President.This doesn’t need to be your problem.

The Justice Department argues that the volume of material it needs
to go through in the CIA’s 2004 inspector general report is just too
great to meet any pre-August 31 timetable. Not only is the IG report
itself 200 pages, that’s just one of 319 documents under review as part
of the case.

The ACLU replies that the CIA and the Justice Department have
already missed three deadlines for the agreed-upon disclosure, and
lawyer Amrit Singh writes that she’s “disturbed by the clear trend
emerging in the government’s repeated delays in disclosure of documents
critical to a complete understanding of the CIA’s interrogation
program.” She says that instead of delaying, Judge Alvin Hellerstein
should order the “expediting the reprocessing and release of all CIA
documents at issue.”

This is the previous administration’s fuckup. This is the previous administration’s regime of total and complete and nonstop fuckuppery. All this report will reveal is how Bush and his people fucked up, from day one, from the day they were handed a joystick and the keys to a Humvee. How they tortured people, for hours, for months, for no good reason, to the detriment of the very things they purported to be trying to accomplish. That’s all that’s in here.

So this isn’t your deal, this won’t make you or even the America of the present look bad. It’ll just remind us all how grateful we are that that administration, the one that authorized such things, is no more. It’ll just remind everyone that we no longer do shit like this, and won’t we all — Americans, everybody all over the world — be happy to hear that?

Unless you make it your deal. Unless you make yourself complicit in this and every other Bush atrocity by continuing to cover up their crimes. Unless you continue to deny and delay and flap around with excuses and have your people blither on about how it’s hard to read books really fast, like that’s the biggest problem here. Every day you sit on things like this, and send your lawyers into court to argue that people can’t handle pictures, or hearing about torture, or how it’s hard to do the right thing really, is a day you get in deeper. The more time you spend hanging out with the horrors, the harder they become to disavow.

This isn’t yours unless you make it yours. Stop making it yours.

A.

3 thoughts on “This Isn’t Yours”

  1. A. that is the best bit of advice to Obama I have seen. Someone (I suggest it be you) needs to take him aside and explain a few things to him, starting with the fact that this is now, not then, and now he is President, and will be judged only by what he does, not by what was done then. The man can be infuriating at times.

  3. On one hand, if Obama fights it a little, he can maintain a distance (kind of a “don’t throw me into the Briar patch” deniability. Admittely, I cringe at the racial stereotype, but I’d say the same for someone of either race).
    But he’s fighting the relase too strongly. Not only do I agree with you that he is making it his, if he keeps fighting it, things will appear as if he actually was involved and perhaps an instigator.

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