Hot Air » Blog Archive » Obama flip-flops on potential torture prosecutions.
And now he’s focused on the past? If so, it may be because Obama decided that he couldn’t take any more heat from the far Left. They’ve been wanting blood for years and expected to get it with a Democrat in the White House and Democrats controlling Capitol Hill. Obama did a pretty good job of putting them off for three months, but apparently that’s the limit of his endurance.
In some ways, though, Obama put himself in an untenable position. The self-proclaimed Constitutional scholar had argued all along that the US broke laws during interrogations, and made that point again when it released the Bush-era OLC memos. In a nation of laws, how does one make that claim as President and not allow the supposed crimes to be probed? Listening to the rhetoric, this flip-flop was entirely predictable.
Obama can open the door to prosecutions, but who will he prosecute? He’ll find it difficult to go after the interrogators, who relied on some strange opinions from the normally-binding Office of Legal Counsel. The prosecution can try undermining that by claiming it as a Nuremberg defense, but this wasn’t Nazi Germany and the OLC exists to give this kind of legal direction. Interrogators relied on those interpretations in good faith.
That leaves George Tenet and the OLC attorneys, but they didn’t conduct the torture, and the OLC didn’t order the interrogations, either. They responded to a request from the CIA to opine on the legality of the procedures. Holder can prosecute Tenet, but then he’d also have to file charges against several members of Congress who were briefed on the procedures and never objected — including current Speaker Nancy Pelosi. If Tenet would get prosecuted for ordering the interrogation techniques, then Pelosi and others would have to get prosecuted for being accessories in not taking action to stop them.
Obama had it right in the first place. He made the decision to ban those procedures, and he should just keep looking forward. If those interpretations were flawed, and I’d agree that at least some of them were, they’ve been withdrawn.
CIA Confirms: Waterboarding Stopped Planned Al Qaeda Attack on Los Angeles
This was the headline at Think Progress just yesterday: Gibbs confirms that torture memo authors are ‘not being held accountable.’
CNN’S ED HENRY: Just so I understand, you’re saying the people in the CIA who followed through on what they were told was legal, they should not be prosecuted? But why not the Bush administration lawyers who, in the eyes of a lot of your supporters on the left, twisted the law, why are they not being held accountable?
GIBBS: The president is focused on looking forward. That’s why.
Watch it:
What a difference a day makes! Could a slide in the polls have anything to do with this?
I suspect this will be his biggest mistake. No better message sent to terrorists that we will seek prosecution for those who try to protect us.
I’m keeping score.