Wait a minute: It’s not Obama’s decision to prosecute Bush officials who permitted torture

The media’s all over it – headlining today from the Washington Post to the NY Times to the Huffington Post (thousands of readers comments) that President Obama is suddenly open to prosecuting officials who permitted harsh interrogations (torture). Glen Greenwald at Salon, however, suggests that even though members of Obama’s staff, e.g., Rahm Emanuel, may be confused, “Obama recognizes: whether to prosecute is not his decision.”

Greenwald writes:

One of the central principles of our justice system is supposed to be that specific decisions about Justice Department prosecutions are to be made independent of all political considerations, including the White House's political agenda or the President's political interests…

This is the principle that has made it so strange, and increasingly disturbing, that the power to decide whether Bush officials should be prosecuted was being vested in Barack Obama. Whether to commence criminal investigations and prosecutions of specific acts of alleged criminality is not Obama's decision to make. It is the duty of the Justice Department, and ultimately the Attorney General, to make those decisions based strictly on legal considerations, and independent of the political interests of the White House. Whether or not Obama favors prosecutions is really irrelevant, and one could almost reasonably argue that the increasingly aggressive pressure he and his aides, such as Rahm Emanuel, have been exerting to impede prosecutions was becoming improper. Given the magnitude of these questions, I think it's unreasonable to argue that the President should refrain entirely from opining on such questions, but the line of propriety can easily be crossed and -- especially with the recent comments of Emanuel and Robert Gibbs all but decreeing that there would be no prosecutions -- that line was starting to be broached.

Obama Administration Too Busy to Prosecute Crimes Committed in the Past

Barack Obama speaks at the CIA. Photo by AP

According to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, the Obama Administration is too busy to bother with prosecuting crimes that occurred in the past. Speaking on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday, Emanuel said:

“It is not a time to use our energy and our time in looking back, and in a sense of anger and retribution. We have a lot to do to protect America.”

Someone should explain to the Obama Administration that we always prosecute crimes after the fact. Listening to Emanuel, you’d get the notion that if you rob a bank on Tuesday and can avoid arrest until Wednesday, you’ll be allowed to go free.

Never mind.

Here’s the report by Burns and Gerstein at Politico:

After days of public debate over his release of the so-called “torture memos,” President Barack Obama on Monday sought to reassure CIA employees that he understood the anxiety some felt over his ban on certain harsh interrogation techniques.

Obama also stressed that he is committed to protecting national security secrets — but said the release of the secret documents prepared by the Bush Justice Department was “the result of a pending court case” that left his administration with little room to maneuver.

“I understand that it’s hard when you are asked to protect the American people against people who have no scruples and would willingly and gladly kill innocents. Al-Qaida’s not constrained by a constitution,” Obama said in his first visit to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.

Obama said he was aware critics were denouncing him as naïve for publishing the legal memos describing interrogation techniques. “I understand that. I watch the cable shows once in a while,” he said. “What makes the United States special and what makes you special is precisely the fact that we are willing to uphold our values and ideals even when it’s hard. So, you’ve got a harder job, and so do I and that’s OK….Over the long term, that’s why I believe we will defeat our enemies: because we’re on the better side of history.”

Obama’s speech came amid mounting criticism from both the left and the right over the White House’s decision to release the memos prepared by the Bush Justice Department, while simultaneously ruling out the possibility of prosecuting officials implicated in torture.

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They’re Adding Up: Obama’s Failures in Leadership

It’s happening more frequently now. Those liberal pundits – except for their ageism, sexism, misogyny, etc. – are drowsily awakening from the euphoria of their infatuation with Barack Obama to see that he’s mortal after all and actually may not be offering effective leadership on a few important issues such as gun control and prosecuting war criminals in the Bush Administration.

E.J. Dionne’s column today is titled Who Will Face Down the Gun Lobby? Dionne Writes:

In other words: Our president can deal with all manner of big problems, but the American gun lobby is just too strong to let him push a rational and limited gun regulation through Congress.

It's particularly infuriating that Obama offered this statement of powerlessness just a few days before today's 10th anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado -- and just after a spree of mass homicides across the United States took the lives of least 57 people.

Andrew Sullivan has the war crimes issue:

And so Obama's refusal to investigate war crimes is itself against the law. And so torture's cancerous route through the legal and constitutional system continues, contaminating the future as well as the past, rendering the US incapable of upholding Geneva against other nations, because it has violated Geneva itself, and giving to every tyrant on the planet a justification for the torture of prisoners.

In this scenario, America becomes a city on a hill, where the rule of law is optional and torture acceptable if parsed into legal memos that do not pass the most basic professional sniff-test.

America becomes a banana republic.

Obama Reprieve For CIA Illegal: U.N. Rapporteur {Reporter}

Reuters reported today (April 18, 2009):

VIENNA (Reuters) - President Barack Obama's decision not to prosecute CIA interrogators who used waterboarding on terrorism suspects amounts to a breach of international law, the U.N. rapporteur {one who is designated to give a report} on torture said.

"The United States, like all other states that are part of the U.N. convention against torture, is committed to conducting criminal investigations of torture and to bringing all persons against whom there is sound evidence to court," U.N. special rapporteur Manfred Nowak told the Austrian daily Der Standard.

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