Caught Up In The Web

Whether he wants to or not, President Obama has to resolve the issue of CIA torture practices.

Barack Obama is currently fighting a seven-front war: Afghanistan, Iraq, the economy, the financial crisis, climate, healthcare reform and torture. The prospects don’t look very good for him in any of them. The debate over torture, which he wanted to quickly win and put behind him, now seriously threatens his administration. The disastrous Bush era casts a long shadow.

The recent release of some of the CIA Inspector General findings in 2004 appear to support the long held suspicion that intelligence service agents or the interrogation specialists they hired were involved in the torture of suspected terrorists – whether within the framework of controversial guidelines or beyond them.

It’s right that, in principle, the law allows for nothing other than to investigate, to examine and, if sufficient solid evidence exists, to indict, try and sentence. That’s why the U.S. attorney general has appointed a special prosecutor. But the process of coming to terms with the past has since taken on a new dynamic that could prove politically very dangerous for Obama, because enforcing the law will demand a very high price.

It is just as unavoidable as it is highly explosive: it’s not only the small-time torturers who are caught in the crosshairs of justice, it’s inevitable that those who initiated and expedited the torture will be targeted as well. The chain of responsibility leads to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. If the former president and his VP ever even appear to be close to indictment, the battles of years past will be mercilessly revived. Obama’s promise to renew America from the ground up would be doomed to extinction in the ensuing tumult.

Yet there can be no turning back because the damage would then be even greater: for Obama’s credibility, for America’s global image, as well as for the justice that this president wants to restore.

Obama, of course, wanted it to turn out otherwise. He had hoped he would be able to erase the disastrous Bush years with a few strokes of his pen. His motto was “let’s leave the past alone and start planning for the future.” That’s why he brought in strict new rules of interrogation shortly after his inauguration. He did away with the secret CIA prisons and ordered the Guantanamo prison camp closed and he made reports of earlier mistreatment public.

But in the same breath, he forbade publication of torture photos and announced his intention to not prosecute the torturers as long as they acted on orders from higher up. In doing so, he continued the old practices of incarcerating suspected terrorists in foreign jails to be interrogated and held long term.

Such seesaw policies weren’t enough for those who had hoped for satisfaction. Obama had already gone too far for that. He granted his liberal Attorney General freedom to act. Even the ethics committee at the Justice Department is now recommending reopening several of the torture cases and prosecution of those found responsible.

Imagine what would have happened had Obama reined in his Attorney General. Everything would have been turned topsy-turvy and it would have appeared that Dick Cheney had been right all along in his dreadful assertion that everything is permissible when it comes to defending freedom and the security of the nation. In making that assertion, Vice-President Cheney again showed his lack of scruples: when it came to getting information from suspects, Cheney felt it was just fine to strangle them until they lost consciousness. And it was okay to threaten their wives with rape or to hold a running electric drill under their noses or to beat their legs bloody.

Cheney insisted that his ruthless anti-terror strategy had produced confessions from prisoners that eventually prevented further attacks on America. A few CIA reports support that assertion, but proof for these claims have yet to be produced. Still, Obama knows full well that in times of doubt the people will always chose the brute force, let’s-go-get-‘em methods as opposed to the sophisticated approaches of a constitutional state. That’s why President Obama fears nothing as much as another attack on America right in the middle of trying to atone for the past.

Will Cheney and company have to face trial? Not necessarily. There are other scenarios in which governmental injustice may be explained and avenged – such as via a truth commission. Whichever direction Obama goes will be his own political decision. Theoretically, he could even put a stop to the wheels of justice and consign everything to history. Legally, he has that power. But if he does that, he will have lost the battle for America’s future. He can only win that battle by facing the past head on – even if he would prefer to avoid that controversy.