The Pushover Presidency
I have recently heard plenty of harebrained attacks on President Obama, ranging from the inane to the clearly ginned up, and I’ve done my best to call out the perpetrators. But when he screws the pooch, as every administration inevitably does, we also need to call him out on it. That’s why I find myself reading the New York Times today and wondering what the heck is going on in the West Wing these days.
Obama Won’t Bar Inquiry, or Penalty, on Interrogations
WASHINGTON — President Obama left the door open Tuesday to creating a bipartisan commission that would investigate the Bush administration’s use of harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects, and did not rule out action by the Justice Department against those who fashioned the legal rationale for those techniques.
I just spent two days reading about how Obama was was interested in “looking forward, not backward.” He was not going to hold the grunts and beurocrats who were assured everything they were doing was legal responsible for their actions, regardless of new policy. And now this?
Here’s what I get from the optics of this situation: first, the Attorney General looks like a toothless lapdog, gumming whatever bones slide his way. Second, and much larger in significance, it looks like President Obama’s team made a decision on how to handle this, but the hard Left in Congress and their supporters screamed for the blood of the Bush administration and Obama backed down in less than 24 hours.
Yes, I’m well aware that many of you are upset about the Bush era policies in question, but that’s not the issue here. Obama and his team had to know this question was coming. (If not, they don’t deserve to be in politics.) They knew they needed an answer and a position on how it would be handled. To have this sort of shift in position in a single day makes them look even more like pushovers for Nancy Pelosi and the furthest Left wing of the party.
Not good, Mr. President. Not good at all.
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107 Responses to “The Pushover Presidency”
CStanley
I just finished reading this entire thread and wish I could have been online. Iknow this is way late in the game, but just a couple comments.
One point did no enter the discussion on the definition of torture, “the threat of imminent death.”
Waterboarding is designed to make the subject feel like he's drowning, and feeling like you're drowning is certainly an experience of imminent death. Knowing that a person feels that sensation, how can waterboarding not be torture? That seems obvious to me, but you may have another way of seeing it.
Additionally, the SERE training example you nailed exactly. SERE trainees can at any time simply say, “I quit.” They also only receive 10-12 waterboarding experiences. We're talking about 183 such times with no “safe word” to stop the session.
I guess I'll have to quit work if I want to get in on these.
HemmD,
I actually mentioned something similar here in this thread: http://themoderatevoice.com/29677/the-pushover-…
Hemm, I agree with you in both instances (obviously I agree on the SERE point since I raised it first and you were seconding.)
But on whether or not waterboarding produces the psychological feeling of threat of imminent death, I agree with your ruling on that but apparently Yoo or one of the other attorneys had an overly legalistic explanation, if I understood it correctly, something about how even though there was the sensation of that, it was not of long duration which they parsed as another requirement before it could meet the legal definition.
Ed Morrissey had a post about this (he agrees with you and with me- that that's just taking the parsing to an absurd level.) If you have a chance you may want to go to HotAir and search 'torture memo' or something to locate it.
So yeah, I agree with that and certainly that might be the nail in the coffin for any attempt at legal defense for those acts. I've been, admittedly, arguing for a harder line defense than I think even the law would provide in those particular cases (and as I think I made clear, that's not at all the way my conscience judges the acts even when I've said that the law might not be sufficient to convict.) I was basically trying to show those who argued that 'laws were obviously broken' that it might not in fact be that cut and dried according to the law as written. I mean, a lot of folks feel that the Conventions and other things we're obligated to honor by treaty have more stringent definitions but then why wasn't similar language included in our domestic law? Seems to me that if we'd take that step, then loopholes would be closed for the future.
It does seem that the parsing on that one issue was so extreme that that line of defense might get thrown out.
I guess I'll have to quit work if I want to get in on these.
Yeah, I've just had to quit vacuuming my house but I'll probably need to resume soon before the dog hair takes over.
GD: I'm sorry that you can't take me at my word about what my sense of justice is, which is not to dismiss what happened to people.
casualobserver…. I'm not sure how to interpret your comments….
Obama did release the memos in such a way to for the GOP to call into question his own ability to keep (or not) the country safe. The easiest thing Obama could have done was simply say that he wasn't going to release the memos due to national security and he was not going to prosecute. Instead he raised the ire of both the far left and the right. The Republicans are attacking him for opening up the country to terrorists. But if Obama, as I think I mentioned in my original post, had gone about it differently it could very well have developed into a strictly partisan battle.
As it is we as a country (unless you're a Rush, etc. fan) are talking about torture and whether it works and whether the Bush administration should be brought to justice. We wouldn't be having this conversation if Obama had said he was going to prosecute the Bush administration. The GOP would have made it into a partisan battle and we'd be whining about how the GOP is trying to derail the issue….. Though they're still trying to derail the issue, just in a different way and not as potently as tehy could.
I don't think Obama did it in a “wink wink, nod nod” sort of way. He may be smart be he can't predict how a multifaceted debate like this would play out among Americans.
If there was one issue I could grill Obama on and find out what he truly thinks and his strategy this is it. Not just because I think it's the most important issue facing our country (do we believe enough in our values to fight for them, even if it means throwing past leaders in prison, or do we let the terrorists win by not fighting for what we believe in?) But this also goes against his training as a lawyer, one who should believe the law. If Obama doesn't believe in the rule of law, then what does he place a higher value on? It's not political favors or friendship or patronage since the most of the people who would be prosecuted are his worst political enemies…. which he appears to want to protect. So I'd love to talk with him on this, more than any other issue.
OK, CS, I'll take you at your word that you find these acts reprehensible. I'm a bit worked up about this because it was done in our names to innocent people. My God, they raped women, sodomized men and even killed a few, probably accidentally. I can't believe anyone is trying to rationalize that in any way. Now I know those weren't justified by the memos, but waterboarding was, explicitly. I'm sure most here are too young to remember, but we actually executed Japanese for waterboarding. There's no ambiguity about what we considered torture. We considered it so despicable as to be punishable by death. Now we seem to be arguing that our laws are too vague to make it clearly illegal. Well, it surely wasn't too vague for us to put foreign soldiers to death for doing it to our soldiers.