They're calling it 'Presidential Poison'
====================
by Mark Silva
"Presidential Poison,'' the Wall Street Journal calls it.
The public, say the editorialists of a board inclined to cast a harsh eye on this president, got a taste of it on April 21 - "mark the day,'' they say.
That was the day that President Barack Obama took a sharp turn in what started out to be a conciliatory healing course in the story of the "torture memos'' of the Bush administration that Obama disclosed last week.
None of the CIA interrogators who carried out the harshest interrogations of suspected terrorists authorized by the Bush Justice Department during the former president's first term would be prosecuted, Obama pledged last week - time to look "forward, not backwards.'' His chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said on the Sunday talk show circuit that the same held for higher-level officials who had authorized the now-banned interrogation tactics - this is not a time for "retribution.''
Then, this week, Obama left open the possibility that his own Justice Department might hold some of the Bush administration's higher-level officials accountable for the acts they authorized. That was the day, the Journal suggests, that any pretense of bipartisanship in Washington disappeared.
"He has absolved CIA operatives of any legal jeopardy, no doubt because his intelligence advisers told him how damaging that would be to CIA morale when Mr. Obama needs the agency to protect the country. But he has pointedly invited investigations against Republican legal advisers who offered their best advice at the request of CIA officials,'' the Journal editorial notes.
"The political convenience of this distinction for Mr. Obama betrays its basic injustice. And by the way, everyone agrees that senior officials, including President Bush, approved these interrogations. Is this President going to put his predecessor in the dock too?''
Now, it seems unlikely that anyone actually will be prosecuted for what they authorized, in good faith, as legal practices -- "a real stretch,'' as one expert told David Savage and Josh Meyer of Tribune's Washington bureau.
Yet congressional leaders are revving up their own "truth commissions'' to get to the bottom of it all - with Senate Judiciary Chairman David Leahy saying the public deserves to know.
There's no question that the public deserves to know.
The question is, who pays. The Journal suggests, it's Obama.
swamppolitics.com |
