Following up on the latest extremist Cheney/Addington/Yoo arguments
advanced by the Obama DOJ in order to shield Bush lawbreaking from
disclosure and judicial review -- an episode I wrote about in detail
yesterday, here
-- it's worthwhile to underscore the implications of Barack Obama's
conduct. When Obama sought to placate his angry supporters after he
voted for the Bush/Cheney FISA-telecom immunity bill last June (after vowing the prior December to support a filibuster of any such legislation), this is what he said (h/t notavailable):
[The
FISA bill] also firmly re-establishes basic judicial oversight over all
domestic surveillance in the future. It does, however, grant
retroactive immunity, and I will work in the Senate to remove this
provision so that we can seek full accountability for past offenses.
So
candidate Obama unambiguously vowed to his supporters that he would
work to ensure "full accountability" for "past offenses" in
surveillance lawbreaking. President Obama, however, has now become the
prime impediment to precisely that accountability, repeatedly engaging in extraordinary legal maneuvers to ensure that "past offenses" -- both in the surveillance and torture/rendition realm -- remain secret and forever immunized from judicial review.
Put another way, Obama has repeatedly done the exact opposite of what
he vowed he would do: rather than "seek full accountability for past
offenses," he has been working feverishly to block such accountability,
by embracing the same radical Bush/Cheney views and rhetoric regarding
presidential secrecy powers that caused so much controversy and anger
for the last several years.
And note the pure deceit on the part of Senate Democrats who justified telecom immunity by continuously assuring the public
that the Bush officials who ordered the illegal surveillance (as
opposed to the telecoms who broke the law by enabling it) would still
be subject to legal accountability. It was obvious at the time (as was
often pointed out) that
they were outright lying when they said this -- because all sorts of
legal instruments had been invoked (such as "state secrets"
and "standing" arguments) to protect those government officials from
that accountability (legal instruments Democrats knowingly left in
place), and now it is Barack Obama who is leading the way in ensuring
that the assurances given by Senate Democrats -- don't
worry that we immunized the phone companies because Bush officials, who
were the truly guilty parties in the illegal spying, will still be
subject to legal accountability -- never materialize.
On a very related note: last night, The New York Review of Books published the full report of the International Committee of the Red Cross (.pdf),
which documented in detail the brutal torture to which the
14 "high-value" detainees whom we disappeared into our CIA "black
sites" were subjected and demanded "that the US authorities investigate all allegations of ill-treatment and take steps to punish the perpetrators, where appropriate." As Scott Horton notes,
the ICRC does not call for investigations and prosecutions easily, but
rather, "only where the evidence of criminal conduct is
manifest." Yet Obama's handpicked CIA Director, Leon Panetta,
continues to demand that there be no investigations of any kind, let
alone prosecutions. As a CIA spokesperson told the New York Times yesterday in response to the ICRC report:
Mr.
Panetta "has stated repeatedly that no one who took actions based on
legal guidance from the Department of Justice at the time should be
investigated, let alone punished." The C.I.A.'s interrogation methods
were declared legal by the Justice Department under President George W.
Bush.
Accompanying the ICRC report was an article by Mark Danner,
the superb journalist who obtained the ICRC Report and disclosed it.
In his article, Danner describes the grave dangers from preserving
ongoing secrecy surrouding Bush/Cheney crimes (h/t bystander; emphasis added):
Barack
Obama may well assert that "the facts don't bear [Cheney] out," but as
long as the "details of it" cannot be revealed "without violating
classification," as long as secrecy can be wielded as the dark
and potent weapon it remains, Cheney's politics of torture will remain
a powerful if half-submerged counter-story, waiting for the next attack
to spark it into vibrant life.
As Danner
explains, it is simply impossible for Obama to "turn the page" on (let
alone reverse) the dark Bush/Cheney era of war crimes while he
simultaneously turns himself into the prime agent suppressing the facts
surrounding those crimes and vigorously shielding the criminals from
all investigation and accountability.