[Marxism] Obama, tell us the whole truth

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

The Independent, February 22, 2009
Leading article: Obama, tell us the whole truth

‘Having considered the matter, the government adheres to its previously 
articulated position.” With these words, Acting Assistant Attorney 
General Michael Hertz ended a dream. The dream that Barack Obama’s 
presidency would inaugurate a transcendent world order on a new moral plane.

Late on Friday Mr Hertz told the Washington district court that the 
Obama administration maintained President Bush’s view that prisoners 
held at Bagram air base in Afghanistan could not challenge their 
detention in US courts. For the cynics, this is “a previously 
articulated position you can believe in”.

This newspaper was not so naive as to imagine that President Obama would 
immediately conform to the most scrupulous interpretation of US and 
international law. We are pleased that he has ordered the closure within 
a year of Guantanamo Bay, halted military trials and restricted CIA 
interrogators to Army Field Manual techniques. But the refusal to grant 
legal rights to detainees at Bagram is disappointing.

The US Supreme Court ruling in 2004 that prisoners in Guantanamo had the 
right to take their cases to US courts ended the anomalous status of the 
prison camp in Cuba. President Bush’s attempt to create a legal limbo 
outside the American and international legal systems had failed. But he 
continued to try to deny legal rights to prisoners not just in 
Guantanamo but in Iraq and Bagram, too.

Mr Obama’s closure of Guantanamo therefore smacks more of fulfilling a 
symbolic pledge than following it through. The Bush administration’s 
legal case was transparently unconvincing. It argued that detainees were 
“enemy combatants” being held until hostilities ceased. If so, they 
should have been entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions 
on the rights of prisoners of war. Yet President Bush resisted even 
that, and now President Obama represents continuity with that policy.

Indeed, Elena Kagan, Mr Obama’s nominee for Solicitor General, said 
during her confirmation hearing that someone suspected of helping to 
finance al-Qa’ida should be subject to battlefield law – indefinite 
detention without trial – even if captured in the Philippines, say, 
rather than a battle zone.

Nor is this the first disappointment of Obama’s presidency. Earlier this 
month, a government lawyer stuck to the Bush line in a case brought by 
Binyam Mohamed, the British resident expected home from Guantanamo 
tomorrow – about whom Clive Stafford Smith writes today. Mohamed and 
others are suing a subsidiary of Boeing for arranging “extraordinary 
rendition” flights, by which they were taken secretly to other countries 
where they say they were tortured.

The Bush administration had argued that the case should be dismissed 
because discussing it in court could threaten national security and 
relations with other nations. When the case resumed after President 
Obama’s inauguration, the judge asked the Justice Department’s lawyer if 
“anything material” had happened to change that view. “No, your Honour,” 
came the reply. The position he continued to take, he said, had been 
“thoroughly vetted with the appropriate officials within the new 
administration”.

What is more, Leon Panetta, Mr Obama’s nominee as CIA director, charged 
with ending the use of torture techniques such as waterboarding by US 
agents, said that the agency is likely to continue to transfer detainees 
to third countries. It would rely on the same assurances of good 
treatment on which the Bush administration depended.

The Independent on Sunday supports the military action to defend the 
people of Afghanistan. We accept that there are some difficult practical 
issues, not least caused by the impossibility of fair legal proceedings 
against existing detainees on account of their past mistreatment. And we 
recognise that, since Mr Obama’s inauguration, the glass of justice is 
fuller than it was.

But the case for respecting human rights remains unanswerable. 
Brutality, torture and long detention without trial are all not just 
morally repugnant but counterproductive. That is an argument President 
Obama himself made when he was running for office. Yet he has said 
nothing about the disappointing retreats from those high principles made 
on his behalf by subordinates in the past three weeks.

Gregory Craig, the White House counsel, said last week that the new 
President intended to avoid “bumper sticker slogans” in deciding what to 
do with the counterterrorism policies he inherited. Human rights and the 
rule of law are not bumper sticker slogans. For the sake of the struggle 
against extremism, Mr Obama needs urgently to deploy his thoughtfulness 
and great eloquence in explaining just where he stands.

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