President Obama’s decision earlier this week to withhold evidence of detainee abuse, lest new images of mistreatment and torture “inflame anti-American opinion and [put] our troops in greater danger,” left him sounding eerily like his predecessor. Obama played down the importance of the suppressed images by saying that they were far less sensational that those from Abu Ghraib. He also claimed that the abuse recorded in the photographs had been investigated and punished with “appropriate action,” so that any legal issues which arose from them had already been resolved. This is simply not true. (As Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post has pointed out, a bipartisan report by Senate Armed Services Committee states that: “The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ‘a few bad apples’ acting on their own… The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.”)
However politically convenient it may seem to ‘look forward’ and ‘move on’ the new administration’s volte face on full disclosure is a terrible miscalculation. The subtext of the administration’s message is clear enough: Let the government make its hard choices discreetly; mistakes have been made but sometimes Keeping America Safe, requires a few corners to be cut. This is dangerous nonsense. Stripped of the new president’s rhetorical charms, his claims are identical to those which Bush, Cheney and their legal ‘torture team’ used to fashion their carte blanche in the war on terror. Obama’s reasonable-sounding dismissal of the evidential value of the new images is essentially a reprise of the sophistical arguments which former Bush officials have used to avoid responsibility and, as is becoming increasingly clear, criminal liability for their actions.
Obama’s justification misrepresents the facts. Anti-American opinion, as many pundits have pointed out, thrives on the idea that America is a hypocrite when it comes to human rights. It demonises other countries, like Iran and China (correctly) but covers up its own lapses. Nothing would refute this caricature of America better than the release of all the evidence, however embarrassing. Another questionable premise is the idea that photographs will inflame anti-American opinion more than the repeated carnage of American air strikes in Afghanistan – a recent one reportedly killed up to 100 civilians – or America’s many other mistakes in Iraq and beyond.
Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com points out the Obama administration is engaged on several fronts that are far more likely to cause outrage, particularly in the Muslim world. For example, the administration recently argued in front of a federal judge that “military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there”; it is reportedly weighing plans to detain terror suspects on US soil “indefinitely and without trial”; and the Justice Department has argued in a court hearing in San Francisco that it would “continue the Bush policy of invoking the ‘state secrets’ defense, which has been used in cases of rendition and torture.” On top of all of this, America continues to supply Israel with the bunker-buster missiles it has been using for strikes against Hamas targets in Gaza. Can new photographs of detainee abuse really outweigh these routine provocations to anti-American feelings around the world?
The President’s disingenousness can be explained politically. By standing up for ‘the troops’ Obama is outflanking recent conservative criticism that the new administration’s overhaul of Bush-era policies have made the country less safe. Although US courts will likely force the government to release the photographs under the Freedom of Information Act, Obama’s new position on the evidence will also spare him the embarrassment of visiting Egypt, in early June, to argue that America is not at odds with the Muslim world, while a new crop of abuse images dominates the news.
Eventually, perhaps, when the images are released Obama will embrace a transparent accounting of the Bush years and accept that the law should be allowed to do its work in the open, to pursue torturers regardless of their former rank. Until that day comes, his manoeuvrings may be smart politics in the immediate context; seen in a wider perspective, however, they are dishonest and undercut his moral credibility. Obama cannot play politics with these issues indefinitely, and he should beware of his administration’s drift towards too much special pleading. The road to Bushism is paved with good intentions.