Obama: Bush Administration Authorized “Torture”
At least, that’s what I think Obama said at his press conference last night, and I’m surprised it’s not getting a bit more attention today.
The key moment came at the end of an exchange with ABC News’ Jake Tapper. After Obama acknowledged that waterboarding is “torture” — a word he and his aides had shied away from using of late — came this:
TAPPER: I’m sorry, sir, but do you believe the previous administration sanctioned torture?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: I believe that waterboarding was torture. And I think that the — whatever legal rationales were used, it was a mistake.
Obama implicitly acknowledged here that the previous administration used “legal rationales” to justify “torture.”
This underscores yet again how dicey this is for Obama politically: He’s acknowledging that the previous administration created “legal rationales” to allow itself to engage in behavior that’s outlawed by international treaties. At a minimum, this would seem to give some pretty powerful ammo to those who want some kind of noncriminal probe into what happened.
What am I missing?
Update: This may be more striking than I first thought; Obama seemed to agree that the previous administration violated “international law.”
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I don’t know that you are missing anything, greg. As some folks pointed out last evening, “mistake” is pretty mild word – as in a spelling error or a dropped bit of china. A traffic accident where someone is injured? There are probably better words to use. Legal rationales supporting torture?
Obama clearly was and is threading a needle here. But I’m not inclined to think he was opening up much with those sentences. Of course, he wasn’t closing options either.
Of all the internal conversations going on in this administration now, this is the one I’d love to hear. It would tell us very much about the realities of political power presently.
I think the President is going to rely on the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation as THE investigation into torture. I think its about 100 percent possible that the SIC won’t come back with a recommendation for prosecution and that the investigation will probably run into next year allowing a cooling off period. The question is how much pressure will continue to be put on Obama to do more than that. Spain moving forward with their investigation might be the motivation thats needed.
even if he said it was a “mistake,” he did say that bush admin sanctioned torture…
I thought the exact same thing last night. I was, thus, very surprised to watch Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow’s rather off-tune analysis immediately after the presser. They seemed to think he was justifying it in some way, that he wavered, etc. — which I found very odd.
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I looked at my wife and asked, “Am I missing something here? Didn’t the President just implicitly admit they did torture and that it was wrong and legally questionable?”
I still say big deal, again it doesn’t matter what he thinks. It’s the DOJ’s call in the end.
Zarik, that’s true, but this is happening in a political context, and it seems like the prez saying that the previous admin authorized something that’s illegal gives ammo for those pushing DOJ to probe…
Greg – that’s true but once you’ve said that your considered opinion is that waterboarding is torture (which he’d said before), the “Bush sanctioned” part follows necessarily because it clearly did. I guess my point was merely to underline the tentative quality of the language around that aspect you are speaking of.
Or perhaps I could say that his language last night leaves open several options. And I think that was the intention.
Off topic and I hope you folks don’t mind if I chuck this in. Ron Suskind famously quoted an unnamed Bush aide back in 2004 who dished up the “you in the reality based community” bit of Machiavallianism. It’s been speculated that Rove was the speaker but that was never verified by Suskind or Rove. But if you take a look at Rove’s column in today’s WSJ you’ll see he quotes Daniel J. Boorstin and if you check up on him with Wikipedia, you’ll find further support for Rove as Suskind’s unnamed aide.
“some kind of noncriminal probe”
Why does this seem to be Greg’s new line? First yesterday and again today. Greg – was it torture? Is it illegal? Why, then, would you push for a noncriminal probe? I don’t think you can have it both ways, Greg. If you think it was criminal, as you obviously do, then it is disingenuous to call for a noncriminal probe.
Unless, of course, your true intent is to seek some way of placating the hard left. Unless you are laying the groundwork to excuse the Obama administration for a failure to investigate criminal activity. Unless you are trying to provide cover for those Democratic congressmen who said and did nothing.
Wasn’t the more interesting part of the presser Obama’s admission that he has read the documents that Cheney has referred to and requested be released? Interesting that Obama refused to say whether they would be released (some transparency – only when it suits his needs apparently). Interesting that Obama does NOT deny that they prove that we got valuable information from the use of enhanced interrogation.
Like Greg, Obama is now attempting to move the goalposts to a new question as to whether we could not have obtained the info some other way. A question that, quite handily, can never be answered!
And here I thought Cheney has been arguing that those interrogations resulted in valuable intelligence . . .
Greg,
What you missed was the subtle signal from the President to the Attorney General, over the objections of many in the DC political establishment, that prosecutions are on the table and that DOJ should proceed. Proceed with extreme caution, but proceed none the less.
especially funny next to John Roberts decision yesterday in the “bungling banmkrobber” case. There are no mistakes when you break the law . . .
added more on this here…
http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/probes-of-bush-administration/obama-agreed-that-the-bush-adminstration-violated-international-law/
g
Dahlia! Let me take this totally inappropriate opportunity to thank you for your work at Slate over the years. Careful, bright, educative and damned funny. And none of this because of our mutual homeland.
If the DoJ relies on the Congressional investigations, any prosecutions stemming from them will be seen as partisan and will create holy hell in the country. They need to create an bipartisan independent commission like the Church Committee to ease the process.
Greg, I think you’re making both too much and too little of what Obama said very carefully.
Obama’s remarks point to how central the OLC opinions were to the system the Bush Admin set up and how dealing with them is central to accountability — who should be accountable, for what, and in what sort of forum (courts, truth commission, Congressional investigations, open or closed, etc). They were and are the ace in the hole for the designers and advocates of torture within the Bush Admin. They made it possible for the Cheney/Addington crowd to roll the other parts of the bureaucracy so their preferred system could be implemented, and they are critical to their attempts to protect themselves from subsequent liability.
Obama is implicitly saying there’s a difference between (1) acknowledging the fact that when government agents waterboarded detainees, torture was committed, which he can do publicly, and (2) concluding that the Bush Administration is responsible for the crime of sanctioning torture, which he may (or may not) believe personally but can’t state publicly.
Or another way to put it — (1) were the OLC memos a good faith undertaking to deal with what the Bushies thought was a whole new grey area between criminal law and laws of war where everything from habeas corpus to treatment of prisoners was, due to the emergency of forestalling future attacks, subject to pushing old envelopes as far as they could be pushed, or (2) were the OLC memos the centerpiece of a criminal conspiracy to engage in illegal action.
Based on reading them, given how absurd they are, I personally believe they were the latter. But until we know how they were produced, and how they related to other actions or bureaucratic intrigues that were going on at the same time, we can’t really draw a firm conclusion. That’s part of why Marcy Wheeler is paying so much attention to trying to figure out how the memos relate to what CIA and DOD and the NSC process were doing as the memos were being crafted.
We have a number of steps to go through before our system (executive, legislative or judicial branches) get to firm conclusions about the legal implications of the OLC memos for accountability. DOJ’s OPR internal review of the OLC memos is the first step in sorting that out, and Obama is being extremely careful not to prejudge that matter.
What Obama can say, however, is that the legal memos were wrong — they’re simply terrible on their face — and that it was a mistake (but not necessarily a crime) for the Bush White House to rely on them when they authorized the “enhanced” interrogation systems.
Almost everyone I see commenting on this recently has been saying, “Torture is a violation of international law!”, or, “Torture is I violation of treaty obligations President Reagan entered into and the Senate ratified!” While both statements are true, I think many people are forgetting that torture is also a violation of United States statute law, passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the President in full accordance with the procedures required by our Constitution. See Title 18 of the United States Code, Part I, Chapter 113c, Section 2340A.
An excellent summary of laws involved (including treaties) is at http://phronesisaical.blogspot.com/2009/04/quick-review-of-torture-law.html
Up to and including now, the President has not made the statement “The Bush administration authorized and condoned torture, which is in violation of domestic and international law” or variations of that theme; he’s been using a more tacit, connect-the-dots technique to convey his point of view. I think this gambit is to prevent the MS newsies and the GOP from being able to quote him directly on his opinion (which I believe is based in fact).
The moment he makes a definitive statement regarding the torture issue, I’m convinced, is when he gets clobbered with attacks from the Right about prejudicial influence from a head of state on any domestic or international tribunal activities.
Which is why he won’t.
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