No wasting time digging up the past? So much for that.
President Barack Obama said Tuesday that his attorney general would determine whether anyone from the Bush administration broke the law by crafting a legal rationale for drastic, demeaning interrogations of terror suspects.
On the surface, it was a pragmatic call: Let the Justice Department lawyers check it out.
Trouble is, the White House had been sending the opposite signal for days. Obama himself tried to close a dark chapter, not open a messy one, as he made public the memos detailing the brutal interrogation methods last week. Nothing, he said, is gained by “spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.” In a flash, the story was not Obama’s decision, but whether he had changed his position. The White House said no, but struggled to explain why not. So what happened? Outside forces, some muddled communication within a tight-ship White House, and a president determined to try to get the debate back on his terms.
Obama also gave Congress a piece of advice: If you are going to order a full looking-back investigation of Bush-era interrogation policies, give it to independent people who are “above reproach and have credibility.” He contrasted that to Congress’ own hearing process “that can sometimes break down.”
The decision itself to release the memos weighed on Obama; he calls it one of the tougher ones he has had to make, which is saying something considering he has widened the war in the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier, ordered deadly force against Somali pirates holding a US sea captain and grappled with a crippling recession.
Yet the tricky part is still going on.
He is out to find just the right balance — hold those accountable who may have broken the law but do nothing to encourage the kind of partisan, perfect-for-television investigatory hearings on Capitol Hill that could steal time and attention away from his agenda. The turn of events also underscored that even a powerful president doesn’t have control of all the events.
He released the memos last Thursday en route to Latin America and the Caribbean and quickly followed up with a reassuring stop at CIA headquarters on Monday soon after he got back. Both went smoothly. But in between, criticism from the left and right built, and the White House message got a little murky.
White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said over the weekend the administration did not support prosecutions for “those who devised policy.” Aides later said he was referring to CIA superiors who ordered the interrogations, not the Justice Department officials who wrote the legal memos allowing them.
Then came Obama’s comments on Tuesday when a reporter asked him if he backed prosecution for those who devised the interrogation policy. He had already shot down the idea of prosecuting any of the CIA agents who carried out the interrogations on grounds they were following the law at the time.
“With respect to those who formulated those legal decisions, I would say that that is going to be more of a decision for the attorney general, within the parameters of various laws, and I don’t want to prejudge that,” Obama said. It immediately seemed like a huge, surprising opening. Which is exactly what some of the liberal and human rights groups that helped get Obama elected want.
MoveOn.org, an influential advocacy group with millions of grass-roots advocates, has launched a petition drive to get Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate what it calls “the architects of Bush’s torture program.”
