Why Obama is right to draw a line under the Bush torture era

by Dalitso Njolinjo

As a follower of American politics I found this week to be a very strange one. The liberal news network MSNBC seemed to have morphed into what they mock almost on a daily basis, Fox News.

I saw them revert to childish jokes to undermine what even I could see was a legitimate political protest at its core by the Libertarians which just happened to be hijacked by the Republican Party. If they would just suppress their hatred for the Republicans for a single day, and fairly reported the ‘tea parties’, they would have realized that there is a real grass roots political movement out there. A Libertarian movement. A movement that is not just angry with Obama and the Democrats, but a movement that is as equally infuriated with the Republicans and its leadership in Washington.

This week also saw the Obama administration make the brave decision of releasing the Bush torture memos and ultimately the Obama administration decided not to prosecute CIA employees who administered torture under the Bush administration. MSNBC and the left’s reaction to this was akin to my deeply religious mother’s reaction when she found out I considered my self an atheist. Disappointment. A sense of disappointment that only a mother can make feel like you have scared her for life.

Keith Olbermanns ‘Special Comment’ acted as the articulated argument summary from the left on why Bush ‘cronies’ must be punished. Olbermann gave examples of how America wrongly moved forward after the Declaration of Independence without addressing slavery and how after World War One, America moved forward without arresting a Kaiser, I found myself asking the question, what about after the Civil War?

Should Lincoln and Johnson have prosecuted and punished all responsible for the confederacies campaign? Should the reconstruction era not have happened at all, should it just have been a period of ‘catharsis’ as Olbermann put it?

9/11 did not just result in a global war on terror; it also led to an American political civil war. A war which inadvertently split the nation. If you were a Republican you were regarded as a patriot and probably agreed with the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. You also probably agreed with all the measures that Bush put in place to ‘keep the homeland safe’. If you were a Democrat you believed the opposite, and you were against the country. This seems to be the way American politics were run for 6-7 years. There was a distinct lack of unity that could be felt from across the pond.

Now the democrats feel that they have their president to fight for their side of the argument, which is a fair assumption but I believe it is important for the ’reconstruction period’ of post 9/11 for Obama to articulate and demonstrate that there are no ‘red states or blue states, just the united states’, just as Lincoln and Johnson did so many years ago.

To seek revenge, retribution or as the left would put it ‘justice’ I believe would have many negative repercussions for America. America would remain divided at a time when the economic and global political circumstances demand unity.

Obama has taken the better course of action by drawing a line under the dreadful chapter by closing black ops prisons as well as Gitmo and stating that America does not torture. Obama should also put clear laws in place to make sure that the tortures and misinterpretation of the law under the Bush years would never happen again.

If you ever needed a week to understand what Obama’s campaign slogan of ‘change you can believe in’ meant, his break from the left on this very issue is exhibit A.

It is clear that Obama is going to govern from the left, but the left should understand that unlike his modern day contemporaries, Obama is not an ideologue.

Dalitso Njolinjo lives in Northamptonshire, England. He is an aspiring writer and communications consultant. He writes that he “enjoys all things politics, sports and French. The ungodly trinity.” He also writes on his own blog.