The Virtue of Obama

On April 30th the Obama administration will have been in office for 100 days: time to take stock of the achievements so far. Some commentators in the field of international justice have proven difficult to please. Yes, they say, there have been some advances, but not enough. There has been “significant progress,” in the words of Human Rights Watch, but also “serious missteps”.

Areas of progress include: banning torture, closing any remaining secret prisons, ordering the CIA to restrict itself to the interrogation techniques used by the Army, and creating a task force to find a way to close the Guantanamo detention center. As a more general measure, Obama has also transferred responsibility for anti-terrorism from the Pentagon to the Department of Justice.

As for the “missteps,” human rights activists cite the President’s refusal to grant habeas corpus to detainees at Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base. Some of these detainees were not captured on the “battlefield,” and so find themselves in a legal black hole similar to that of Guantanamo. Human rights activists are also surprised at Obama’s refusal to put a complete stop to the CIA’s rendition of suspects from country to country without the knowledge of the governments concerned.

Another complaint that has emerged this week is about the administration’s refusal to set up a commission on torture. Despite the fact that he personally took the decision to release the memoranda written by Bush administration lawyers between 2002 and 2005, Obama has been accused of allowing himself to be intimidated by the Republicans.

For the time being Obama prefers to “look toward the future”. He does not want to be associated with divisions or grudges. Above all, he wants to keep the spotlight firmly on his economic and diplomatic policies. He needs a return of confidence if the economy is to revive. His efforts may not be in vain: the majority of Americans think that the country is heading in the right direction.

The human rights organizations are only doing their job. But they are wrong to be so impatient. When he defied the recommendations of some of his advisors and took the decision to publish those memos, which authorized the use of waterboarding, Barack Obama set in motion a virtuous cycle which will be difficult to stop. There is evidence of this, for example, in the fact that the Pentagon is preparing to release photos of degrading treatment suffered by some of the detainees in Iraq. What other democracy would do as much?