[E]ven as he tried to reassure the Central Intelligence Agency that it would not be blamed for following legal advice[,] Mr. Obama said it was time to admit “mistakes” and “move forward...”
And while Mr. Obama vowed not to prosecute C.I.A. officers for acting on legal advice, on Monday aides did not rule out legal sanctions for the Bush lawyers who developed the legal basis for the use of the techniques.
The president’s decision last week to release secret memorandums detailing the harsh tactics employed by the C.I.A. under his predecessor provoked a furor that continued to grow on Monday as critics on various fronts assailed his position. Among other things, the memos revealed that two captured Qaeda operatives were subjected to a form of near-drowning known as waterboarding a total of 266 times….
On Sunday, Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said on the ABC News program “This Week” that “those who devised policy” also “should not be prosecuted.” But administration officials said Monday that Mr. Emanuel had meant the officials who ordered the policies carried out, not the lawyers who provided the legal rationale….
[T]he Democratic chairmen of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees are pushing for a commission to look into the matter. At the same time, the administration faces pressure from abroad. Manfred Nowak, the United Nations’ chief official on torture, told an Austrian newspaper that as a party to the international Convention against Torture, the United States was required to investigate credible accusations of torture.
The policies have been reversed or are being reversed. You can pretend that this doesn't matter, but it does.
Obama is President, he is not a prosecutor, and the actual prosecutor is supposed to be independent. Rather surreally, the thing for me is that I fully think there will indeed be prosecutions, impeachments, disbarments, and consequences across the board for these illegal policies (something I scarcely imagined possible in the dark days), and I see nothing that anybody is saying as any reason to doubt either that they will be or even that Obama wants just this result. He's a Constitutional scholar, you know. Those who say Obama should be demanding these prosecutions and raising hell in the face of a nervous CIA whose support he actually does need rather than simply supporting his AG when the process unfolds are being far less scrupulously principled than they seem to fancy themselves as -- remember, we like independent judiciaries and smooth functioning accountable processes in our nation of laws.
When Obama asked for advice about the release of the torture memos, many in his cabinet urged secrecy but Holder quite properly recommended their release and they were released. By all means, ignore the implications of that. You may notice that the Administration is walking back the impression that Emanuel's Sunday slip-up, if that's what it was, suggests the architects of the torture regime are to be immune from prosecution. You may not have noticed that even if those who were "following orders" are to be so immune, this wouldn't necessarily immunize all those who participated in some of the acts of torture we've already heard about which seem to go beyond even the immoral and illegal pseudo-limits specified in the memos themselves.
Let the process unfold, keep the pressure up, but don't undermine the work that is also underway with silly self-indulgent declarations about Obama's "complicity" in war crimes as he struggles under the auspices of damaged laws and institutions and processes to make things right. We don't approve of "Unitary Executives" even when they say things we approve of, surely. Stop shooting yourselves in the foot to no purpose.
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