Endless Winter
Last week, the Obama administration released four memos from the Bush administration that described their views on permissible interrogation methods. They’re from the Department of Justice, addressed to the CIA. One is from 2002, and three are from 2005. The decision as to whether to release the memos, and how much of them to release, came down to Obama himself, and entailed a fight in the Administration. Attorney General Eric Holder advocated releasing as much of the memos as possible, and CIA head Leon Panetta pushed hard not to. Apparently, these may have been released last month, except that 4 different ex-CIA heads all pushed for them not to come out.
But Obama sided with Holder, and so now they’re out. They are detailed, intense, and don’t redact much. They read like a person wrote them. Here are the PDFs, as downloaded from CNN (I recommend the 2002 memo for the juiciest details):
August 1, 2002
May 10, 2005
May 10, 2005
May 30, 2005
Now every country, and every terrorist organization, can see exactly what the Bush administration was willing to do in the interrogation rooms, what they were bluffing about, and can infer exactly what the Obama administration won’t do. To many of our enemies, this will reduce their enthusiasm and malice. But of course, some of them will be emboldened, and some interrogations will be less effective as a result.
I think Obama made the right call, and I recognize the price he had to pay to make it happen. Any CIA operative who followed the guidelines that the CIA asked for, and the Dept of Justice blessed, won’t be prosecuted. In fact, Holder has pledged the Justice Department to defend any CIA employee in any lawsuits brought against them as a result of the release of the memos. Everything will get washed under the bridge.
It’s a tough pill for me, many liberals, and certainly human rights organizations, to swallow. But it’s difficult to disagree with Obama and Holder that CIA agents individually need to have the confidence that if they do their jobs inside the guidelines they’re given, they won’t be personally destroyed as a result. I’m not interested in defending the CIA and every one of their programs (I don’t think that’s possible), but many agents are simply individuals committed to protecting our country, a job that would be impossible if they couldn’t trust their own bosses or legal analyses.
I’m also willing to frame the situation as analogous to Ford’s pardon of Nixon - difficult to accept, but in the country’s better interests. (EDIT: The Nixon analogy is a bad one. I’m in favor of prosecuting the senior officials who crafted the Bush torture policy. I’m against prosecuting the rank-and-file who implemented it.) The biggest win here is that we now know, undeniably, without any need for political spin or media interpretation, exactly what we’re responsible for, and one of the many reasons why Bush destroyed our reputation in important places around the world.
With that knowledge, we have levels of protection against this happening again. Leon Panetta argued that the precedent of disclosure it would set could be extremely dangerous to the CIA; and it will. The CIA now knows, lawsuits against its employees or not, that it can be held accountable to the public in important ways.
I’m not anti-interrogation. But I believe that this can be part of a broader shift of the US’ priorities, to form reactions and policy decisions that promote less fervent opposition abroad, and reduce the potency of threats. This is going to force the government, and the CIA, to look at the bigger picture of what we’re doing, and not just to trust that we can clean up whatever mess we make with the nastiest and most legally dubious of tools.
And that’s exactly what Obama said at a recent trip to the CIA:
What makes the United States special, and what makes you special, is precisely the fact that we are willing to uphold our values and our ideals even when it’s hard, not just when it’s easy; even when we are afraid and under threat, not just when it’s expedient to do so. That’s what makes us different.
So, yes, you’ve got a harder job. And so do I. And that’s okay, because that’s why we can take such extraordinary pride in being Americans. And over the long term, that is why I believe we will defeat our enemies, because we’re on the better side of history.
Apropos our conversation yesterday, I continue to find it incomprehensible and borderline fanatical for you to simultaneously defend the decision to hold accountable neither those who committed these crimes, in the name of “just doing your job,” nor the leaders who are ultimately responsible for giving the orders, in the name of the even more dubious principle of “healing old wounds.”
Nixon is arguably where all of this mess started, with the gradual absorption of the powers of the other branches into the administrative branch. Not imprisoning him was a huge mistake, and an immense injustice to the victims of his administration (the democratic party being the least, almost to superfluity, of those) It’s no wonder that Obama, who ran on a a platform of almost 100% opposition, continues to support a policy of non-transparency, and extra-legal authority that many of the left are criticizing for being even more extreme than those of Bush’s administration.
I find this indefatigable belief in the power of single personalities like Obama to fix these immense structural forces of violence as irrational and irresponsible as those on the ultra-left that just want global revolution and overthrow of capitalism. Faith in government, sure; but when it starts invoking the principle of its own preservation for its acts, the criminality of which are obvious even to it, as if it were an end in itself, it is absolutely in contradiction with its own raison d’etre, and it will ultimately continue to engender those same forces it claims to be the only hope against, as it has done since its inception, without exception.
floyd
Apr 21, 1:31pm
poss.ibili.st
Umm, how in the hell was Ford’s pardon of Nixon in the country’s better interest? This may be a stretch, but don’t you think Bush overstepped his bounds at least partially because Nixon was pardoned and not held accountable for his actions?
bertrand
Apr 21, 2:06pm
I’d like to see pretty much every high ranking official in the Bush administration thrown in jail for unconstitutionally usurping authority, abusing the use of executive privilege, and even for war crimes. In fact, I disagree with the Obama administration’s decision not to open any investigations into the Bush administration’s senior officials. That’s where the crimes are, and where the “bad people” are.
But to open the gates to prosecution of the CIA rank and file, who acted on the blessing of the Department of Justice, would essentially mean classifying the Bush torture practices as war crimes. I see the Bush administration’s practices as illegal, wrong, and antithetical to our values, but I don’t think we should go Nuremberg on their asses, and declare that every CIA official following immoral orders were acting immorally and are individually accountable.
You need to be more careful before ascribing my opinions here to indefatigable fanaticism to Obama. I’m well aware of the Obama administration’s even further abuse of executive privilege in the arena of warrantless wiretapping, and I’m donating more to the EFF so they can fight on that front. Just like most of us on the left, I’m learning to cope with various compromises, and starting to get a more realistic view of what the next 4 years will bring.
I am praising Obama personally for making the decision to overrule the CIA‘s past and present leaders, and side with the new Department of Justice. But I’m also not blind to the fact that this may never have happened if the ACLU didn’t have a pending court case that pressured the Administration to act first, essentially to save face. That doesn’t mean that Obama’s acts were without merit, or don’t reflect a more positive value system than Bush had. If we were still under Bush, or McCain, this could have been a whole lot uglier, more protracted, and the memos could have seen a far greater number of redactions.
Eric
Apr 21, 2:07pm
mill-industries.com
To include Bert in my response – Nixon, and the CIA, were all held publicly accountable for their actions, and accountable by history. Not as effective as legal punishment in deterring future behavior, certainly. But, dubious or not, I believe in the idea that it’s more important to spend our emotional and legal resources moving forward and putting better practices and principles in place, than it is to spend them getting revenge on the people than whom we have already proved ourselves better.
Eric
Apr 21, 2:15pm
mill-industries.com
I don’t want this to get more heated than it has to, seeing as like you I see the publication of these memos as a positive step. Part of my stubbornness is precisely because I think the benefit of these memos is not so much their provision of yet another opportunity to damn the Bush administration, but the possibility of opening up people eyes to the danger of allowing covert use of violence for any reason.
Along those lines, if you would like me to be more “careful” about accusing you of fanaticism, I’d advise you to be more circumspect with your tone. Your comment, insofar as it is almost entirely qualification, seems more balanced, but your post contains no reflection on the possibility of continued malfeasance, but is chock full of praise for Obama for making the right decision when “it came down to him” and apologetics for the CIA of all things. The CIA is responsible for some of the biggest disasters of our century, and then to dismiss the Nixon acquittal! It’s too much! Perhaps you thinking of Watergate. Try Pinochet.
floyd
Apr 21, 2:23pm
poss.ibili.st
And, on the note of prosecuting the senior officials responsible:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/04/21/obama.memos/index.html
Awesome. And my whole point is that this is a completely acceptable level of culpability for me. I don’t need to go lower than this in the CIA chain of command to feel like justice has been done, and the right people have been punished.
Eric
Apr 21, 2:37pm
mill-industries.com
http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/dictators/agosto-pinochet/
fxbx
Apr 21, 2:42pm
“Nixon, and the CIA, were all held publicly accountable for their actions, and accountable by history.”
I don’t think those words mean what you think they mean. Resignation is NOT being held publicly accountable. By that metric, there was no need to put Jeff Skilling on trial for Enron – he stepped down, his shares were worthless, why push the issue?
Nixon said during his interview with Frost: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Do you think we’ve concluded that issue? Can you think of any other presidents in recent history that might believe that?
I wasn’t alive for Nixon’s pardon, but it still infuriates me. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to have been one of the millions of Americans who worked towards getting Nixon impeached only to have him resign and Ford pardon him. If my faith in the American government had been almost completely destroyed at that point, that would certainly have clinched it. And you have only to look at Ford’s approval rating to see that many, many Americans felt that way. Again, I wasn’t there, but at least we have Hunter S. Thompson to tell it like it was, from “Fear and Loathing in Limbo: the Scum Also Rises” about Ford’s pardon of Nixon:
Well… this is going to be difficult. That sold-out knucklehead refugee from a 1969 “Mister Clean” TV commercial has just done what only the most cynical and paranoid kind of malcontent ever connected with national politics would have dared to predict…
If I followed my better instincts right now, I would put this typewriter in the Volvo and drive to the home of the nearest politician—any politician—and hurl the goddamn machine through his front window… flush the bugger out with an act of lunatic violence then soak him down with mace and run him naked down Main Street in Aspen with a bell around his neck and black lumps all over his body from the jolts of a high powered “Ball Buster” cattle prod.
But old age has either mellowed me or broken my spirit to the point where I will probably not do that—at least not today, because that blundering dupe in the White House has just plunged me into a deep and vicious hole.
bertrand
Apr 22, 1:15am
I don’t want to turn this thread into a debate about the Nixon pardon – it was a bad analogy, and I updated the post yesterday to say as much. I do stand by my feelings on it, though, in spite of the awesome Hunter S. Thompson. :)
Eric
Apr 22, 10:56am
mill-industries.com