Torture: Obama’s gray new reality

last updated 8 January 2015

Dick Cheney in shackles? Don’t hold your breath, said William Kristol in The New York Times. The president-elect this week dashed the hopes of those rabid liberals who want to see Bush administration officials prosecuted for their supposed “war crimes” in the wake of 9/11. In an ABC interview, Barack Obama made it clear he wouldn’t pursue criminal investigations of Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program or the use of torture on terrorist detainees, saying, “We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” This was reassuring news, said William McGurn in The Wall Street Journal, as was Obama’s comment that shutting down the U.S. detention camp at Guantánamo Bay would be “more difficult than I think a lot of people realize” and might take up to a year. Now that the responsibility for preventing another 9/11 is on Obama’s shoulders, he’s clearly not so anxious to toss all Bush-Cheney policies in the wastebasket.

In fact, Obama may find himself continuing some of those policies, said Stuart Taylor Jr. and Evan Thomas in Newsweek. But that doesn’t mean he has to copy the Bush administration’s arrogant, secretive style. Rather than asking Congress to authorize new wiretapping rules or interrogation techniques, Bush and Cheney always preferred to say nothing and use executive orders and in-house legal rulings to create new policy. Obama will have many of the same “thorny issues” to deal with, such as what to do with the real al Qaida operatives currently in U.S. custody and where to draw the line between tough interrogation methods and torture. To make a clean break with this administration, though, Obama has to “level with the American people about what he is doing to protect their liberties—while keeping them safe.”

That’s a cop-out, not a compromise, said Christopher Hayes in TheNation.com. The notion that national security requires real men to do things they’re not proud of is the same one Bush and Cheney have been pushing since 9/11, and unless Obama rejects it entirely, our reputation as a nation of torturers may become permanent. To erase that stain, Obama need not get Cheney thrown in prison, said Joe Klein in Time. But there does need to be “some official acknowledgement” that the previous administration engaged in actions that were “reprehensible, and quite possibly illegal.” It’s not enough for Obama to quietly retire the brutal policies of his predecessor. The world needs to hear, loud and clear, “that the U.S. is no longer in the torture business.”