Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Making Conservatism a Crime
It appears that many liberals and many in the Obama administration are not satisfied with an electoral victory, they want to send conservatives to prison. The recent push to criminalize essential policy differences has led President Obama to hint that he is open to the idea of bringing criminal charges against the Justice Department lawyers who wrote opinions that support waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods that could legally be used on al Qaeda detainees. So Obama is contemplating having lawyers prosecuted because s/he wrote a legal analysis with which the current administration disagrees. This is outrageous. Whether one agrees with the legal opinion written by the lawyers is immaterial. It is the naked attempt to criminalize the opinion that is astonishing.
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My belief is that this is a strategy.
A strategy to send signals: to constituents that he hasn't forgotten what upset them so during the Bush administration, to the world that we are no longer who you thought we were, and to any lingering CIA/FBI/military types who think that these types of torture are ok. It will not have mattered if there is any follow through: the saber-rattling will serve the purpose.
There will be a few slaps on the hands.
I may be wrong, but it will not politically serve him or Democrats to purse this beyond the elementary phases.
I think these kinds of things are very unpatriotic. I am so sick of anti-American Americans. They are clearly lending a hand to making our image unpopular in the world. The world watches our mainstream media which is highly liberal and see us pecking at each other's eyes. They watch President Obama agree to prosecute our prosectuters and release high secret CIA documents to incriminate people in the former administration because his administration didn't like the policies even though it was all legal. In my eyes that is just turning on your own in front of the whole world and throws fuel on their fire to dislike us. It also gives the enemy an open door to some of our secrets. We are still at war with terroist...I don't think that is a good idea. I feel like Obama is trying to buddy around with the wrong kind of world leaders. He should maintain a stancher attitude with the likes of Chavez and Castro. The appearance on the world is that we will no longer carry a big stick and we will be wussies. We'll lose our superpower image and will have a hard time regaining the power that goes with it in the world courts and world opinions. I dislike his soft touch. I know he is trying to look like he is opening up dialog with everyone but I think he better be careful to not end up looking like a softy to the world and lose credibility. Ok...so I am not very good with words...but do you know I am trying to say?
Even as a strategy, it is alarming. Never has a new administration threatened criminalization of policy differences. Even the threat blows my mind.
So far, my theory holds. I admit that the White House is losing a bit of control over the situation, but I believe that the WH will get a handle on it, either that or the media will lose interest as other fresher fish to fry emerge (such a swine flu). Obama has flipped and flopped a bit on this one, stating at once that he didn't want to see prosecutions of the writers of the policies governing torture and yet leaving the doors too open to a course that would go that direction.
Torture is illegal. That is not in dispute by anyone.
Two question without concrete answers haunt this situation.
a) Whether or not we consider the methods used constituted torture or not.
b) Are there situations in which we would accept torture?
My answers: a) Yes, the methods used were torture thus laws were broken and accountability is in theory warranted, although not politically.
b) Yes, but policies need to be written that would severely restrict its use and whose oversight involves authorization from the very top: generals and the president, but I believe that those situations are so rare that it is unlikely that said policies would be ever used. In my opinion, the situations under which torture has been used has been unwarranted. Retrospective transparency is the key.
All this said, Obama is navigating in fairly new waters: we have tortured and now we must, yet again, create coherent policies in hindsight, in essence he must begin to clean up a moral mess created by the Bush Administration.
Thus the shot across the bow to send the desired signals, but signals only with no teeth. The next step is clearly delineated policies that can not be contravened.
All this is made necessary by a new era: terrorists and mass destruction capabilities.
A discussion about the definition of torture is an important one. If water-boarding is indeed torture, the hundreds of people have been tortured since Obama has been president. The military routinely uses water-boarding in military training (I think it is voluntary though), but, again, that is another discussion.
I am not sure of the "shot-across-the-bow" theory, since "the bow of the ship" is currently Obama's ship, so a mere change in policy would have sufficed. Leaving open the possibility of prosecutions is a sop to Obama's hard-left base, but I agree that the prosecutions will not happen. Obama puts his own administration in danger of prosecutions after he leaves office. It's a precedent that must not be started else we end up with old-style purges of communist regimes.
In training, I doubt that the measure is used as thoroughly, voluntary or not. Toughening up military employees is one thing...
What I mean by shot across the bow is really just a signal: but across the bow so that the military, CIA etc know that he is serious. Sure it is his administration, but he still must let all know that he is the commander in chief. I suspect, and I can only suspect, that the former administration, with a wink and nod, claimed to "know" little about the extent these measures were used.
Actually, the recently release CIA memos show that Bush, Cheney, and Congress (both Dem and Rep alike) were briefed and knew about it and approved it or at least did not object. (So Pelosi's claim that she didn't know that it actually was going on is patently false.)
hmmmm......water boarding....cutting off heads.....water boarding....cutting off heads....Hmmmmmmm
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