newsrackblog.com

Word cloud of Obama’s speech, via Aziz
Poonawalla. Originally uploaded by abde,
used here by permission.

President Obama and former Vice Torturer Cheney gave much-anticipated speeches in Washington on Thursday. I tend to agree with critics who are a little weary of Obama’s trademark eloquent lip service to constitutional values and rule of law, while belittling those who actually insist on defending it as “finger pointers.” For me, Obama’s most telling lines were these:

…the recent debate has been obscured by two opposite and absolutist ends.

On one side of the spectrum, there are those who make little allowance for the unique challenges posed by terrorism, and who would almost never put national security over transparency. On the other end of the spectrum, there are those who embrace a view that can be summarized in two words: “anything goes.” Their arguments suggest that the ends of fighting terrorism can be used to justify any means, and that the President should have blanket authority to do whatever he wants - provided that it is a President with whom they agree. Both sides may be sincere in their views, but neither side is right.

That first part sounds like a bit of payback for a reportedly testy meeting between Obama, high level staff, and leading civil liberties advocates in the White House on Wednesday, in which “one of the attendees warned the President he was letting George Bush’s policies become his own [...] Obama was not pleased by that characterization.” Thanks a bunch for using weasel words like “little allowance” and “almost never” while balancing off the ACLU, CCR, HRW, and HRF against a miscreant like Cheney — a tired “if they’re all mad at me, I’m doing something right” approach.  Yet it’s been groups like these — far more than Obama’s own party — who have been plinking away at U.S. government excesses these last 8 years; it’s an open question whether Obama would be president at all without their work.

Of course, Obama looks and sounds great compared to Cheney:

Some are even demanding that those who recommended and approved the interrogations be prosecuted, in effect treating political disagreements as a punishable offense, and political opponents as criminals. It’s hard to imagine a worse precedent, filled with more possibilities for trouble and abuse, than to have an incoming administration criminalize the policy decisions of its predecessors.

No, it’s hard to imagine a worse precedent, filled with more possibilities for trouble and abuse, than to have an incoming administration shrink from prosecuting the crimes of its predecessors for the sake of expediency.

Trouble is, Obama sees that as some kind of unseemly food fight:

I understand that it is no secret that there is a tendency in Washington to spend our time pointing fingers at one another. And our media culture feeds the impulses that lead to a good fight. Nothing will contribute more to that than an extended re-litigation of the last eight years. Already, we have seen how that kind of effort only leads those in Washington to different sides laying blame, and can distract us from focusing our time, our effort, and our politics on the challenges of the future.

With that, here are some reactions from other respected writers in the blogosphere and among activists.

=====

digby, “Hullabaloo”:

Actions, not words are what matter in this case. Unfortunately, the last administration lied so constantly and so blatantly in the name of national security that the new president has to make a much stronger case and demonstrate his commitments much more visibly before anyone will believe America has changed its policy. Just saying you believe in the constitution and that America should live up to its values isn’t really good enough. After all, Bush used to say the same thing.

Juan Cole , “Informed Comment”:

By declining to draw a clear and adjudicable line, Obama is unwittingly allowing the Right to lay the groundwork for permanent move to presidential dictatorship. Obama says he doesn’t want to re-litigate the last 8 years. That is frankly disingenuous. The last 8 years was never litigated. And crimes were committed. If they are not addressed, they will become norms, not crimes.

publius, “Obsidian Wings”:

There was one part of Cheney’s speech that disturbed me though. From listening to Cheney (and others), you get the sense that they are now rooting for another terrorist attack. In that respect, Cheney’s speech was more than a retroactive defense of past criminal acts. He was looking ahead. He was setting up the political chessboard to attack Obama and the Democrats in a particularly poisonous way if – God forbid – we are attacked again.

David Swanson (AfterDowningStreet, ImpeachCheney) on Real News Network –

Glenn Greenwald (Salon.com):

Obama repeatedly invoked the paradigm of The War on Terror to justify some extreme policies — see my post of earlier today on this practice — beginning with his rather startling declaration that he will work to create a system of “preventive detention” for accused Terrorists without a trial, in order to keep locked up indefinitely people who, in his words, “cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people.”  In other words, even as he paid repeated homage to “our values” and “our timeless ideals,” he demanded the power (albeit with unspecified judicial and Congressional oversight) to keep people in prison with no charges or proof of any crime having been committed, all while emphasizing that this “war” will continue for at least ten years.

hilzoy, “Obsidian Wings”:

If we don’t have enough evidence to charge someone with a crime, we don’t have enough evidence to hold them. Period.

The power to detain people without filing criminal charges against them is a dictatorial power. It is inherently arbitrary. What is it that they are supposed to have done? If it is not a crime, why on earth not make it one? If it is a crime, and we have evidence that this person committed it, but that evidence was extracted under torture, then perhaps we need to remind ourselves of the fact that torture is unreliable. If we just don’t have enough evidence, that’s a problem, but it’s also a problem with detaining them in the first place.

Andrew Sullivan:

I regard it as the national security equivalent of his Jeremiah Wright speech. Why? Because it managed to reach a place apart from, while being fully part of, the furious debates we have been having. These debates are vital, and the notion that we can simply move on from the Bush-Cheney era without some accounting or reform is both empirically and morally false.  [...]

This speech, to my mind, was a conservative one by a conservative president who seeks first and foremost to use existing institutions to address the new challenges of the moment, and then seeks  pragmatic compromises, always open to future checks and balances, in those places where such institutions clearly need reform and adjustment.

Gene Healy (author of “The Cult of the Presidency” — at minimum a good 5 word diagnosis of what ails us):

Real civil libertarians aren’t fooled by Obama’s “kinder, gentler” rhetoric, but Obama knows that civil libertarians are a miniscule voting block. His aim is to convince Democratic voters that he’s kept his promises to change Bush’s draconian approach to the war on terror. In this, Dick Cheney is an enormous asset to the president. As Obama quietly adopts the Bush policies, Cheney gives him cover by loudly insisting that there’s a meaningful difference here. It’s a very Washington sort of partnership: an argument so grating that you could be fooled into thinking there’s some great difference of principle here. Sort of like the Carville-Matalin marriage.

Maybe the best reaction to both speakers came before they even made their speeches. David Waldman (of the Daily Kos site “Congress matters”) attended the White House meeting on Wednesday, and wrote afterwards:

I’m still concerned, for instance, that the Republican theory of executive power with respect to detainee policy — something the President referred to as “anything goes” in his speech today — is in fact the Republican theory of executive governance in general. That poses an extraordinarily broad array of difficulties, not the least of which is that it’s an open an ongoing threat to the greater Obama agenda, which is itself often invoked as a reason for not dabbling in the “distraction” of “looking backward.” But unless we can demarcate Cheneyism — the “anything goes” philosophy as explicitly illegal, unconstitutional and illegitimate, its continued existence (and threatened practice by future administrations) calls into question the value and durability of the whatever parts of the Obama agenda are ultimately implemented, on detainee policy or anything else.

=====
SEE ALSO: talking dog, Andy Worthington, Roy Edroso, Jacob Heilbrun, David Corn; New York Magazine has an alternative round up (”Obama vs. Cheney: The Reactions Are In“) with more right-wing and paid journalist type reactions including Malkin and Kristol, but also Heilbrun, Fallows, etc.
UPDATE, EDIT, 5/23: Healy added; via Henley, where the comments are very worthwhile, as usual.
UPDATE, 5/27: Scott Horton is wait-and-see: “It is critical to the peace and security of our society that we have a watchful government, working hard to identify violent and criminal elements. The development and steady proliferation of technologies of devastation makes this concern increasingly acute. But government must be restrained by the knowledge that it is not omniscient, that it makes mistakes particularly when it purports to be all-knowing, and that justice is our most fundamental value. Obama’s proposals on “prolonged detention” will be worth a careful hearing when they are finally presented with any measure of specificity. But they should also be confronted with healthy skepticism and an insistence that they be checked against the Constitution and the laws and values that define America.”