The biggest criticisms of Obama from the left have been about his policies regarding continuation of some of the Bush state secrets policies. He seems to be going back on a campaign promise to be open and accountable to the American people. Although I strongly disagree with many of his decisions, I think I understand why he’s making them. Obama is in a really unfortunate situation of inheriting Bush’s really f’ed up everything – Bush’s FUBARed econcomy, FUBARed foreign policy and FUBARed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama really wants to get positive things done like fixing the economy, improving the U.S.’s standing in the world and getting healthcare for all Americans and he feels like a long, drawn-out fight about actions of the Bush adminstration will lead to gridlock and distract from the real work that needs to be done.
Cheney, Porter Goss and others have already been firing warning shots across the bow, with leaks about Jane Harman’s wiretap and Pelosi’s briefings. Cheney et al. are warning Democrats that they will take them down with them if necessary. Republicans have put themselves in the position of arguing two mutually exclusive ideas, that torture is necessary and that Nancy Pelosi is bad for not objecting to it. What the Republicans are perhaps failing to realize is that the steady drip of revelations makes investigations more likely, not less. Pelosi is now calling for investigations, perhaps thinking that investigations will clear her name or that worse revelations will distract people from her actions.
The latest non-Pelosi revelations are even more damning and will just increase the pressure to conduct investigations. McClatchy has reported that Dick Cheney ordered torture to get evidence for the non-existent Iraq-al Qaida link:
“There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder,” he continued.
“Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies.”
Senior administration officials, however, “blew that off and kept insisting that we’d overlooked something, that the interrogators weren’t pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information,” he said.
Buh bye ticking time bomb scenario.
GQ is now reporting about how Rumsfeld sent Iraq war reports to Bush with religious imagery and Biblical quotations. [Slideshow
here]
The briefing’s cover sheet generally featured triumphant, color images from the previous days’ war efforts: On this particular morning, it showed the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down in Firdos Square, a grateful Iraqi child kissing an American soldier, and jubilant crowds thronging the streets of newly liberated Baghdad. And above these images, and just below the headline secretary of defense, was a quote that may have raised some eyebrows. It came from the Bible, from the book of Psalms: “Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him…To deliver their soul from death.”
Below is an example of a report cover:
This is what our government was doing in our names, under the guise of protecting us. And we’re only scratching the surface. We must find out what happened so we can make sure it never happens again. I don’t want a repeat of the mistakes of Watergate and Iran/Contra, which was just move on. Meanwhile, people who were doing things wrong sit in positions of respect and come back into power eventually. Cheney and Rumsfeld both came from the Nixon era.
To move forward, we’re going to have to look backwards. I hope Obama is trying to follow the Roosevelt model of “make me do it.” If so, it is smart politics to let the pressure for investigation build from the American people so that the eventual investigation does not look like a partisan witch-hunt.