President Obama deserves credit for releasing the Bush torture memos. But his position on torture prosecutions is so muddled it gives nuance a bad name (and just when it was making a comeback). There are so many bad actors it’s hard to figure out how to handle them all, but Obama’s position is, or appears to be: CIA interrogators won’t be prosecuted. The lawyers who wrote the now-infamous memos may be. The top officials who were ultimately responsible – Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tenet, others – probably not. And – maybe – there should be some kind of 9/11-style commission to examine this. But Obama is not actually calling for that, just suggesting it.
This makes sense only through the prism of politics – and a complex politics it is, involving constituencies in the intelligence and defense bureaucracies, Congress and the nation as a whole. Obama is trying to please, or to not offend, as many of these constituencies as possible, while at the same time laying down a clear marker against torture.
Obama should be setting the tone for how the country handles the torture issue. Instead, the debate has slipped away from him entirely and taken on a life of its own. Democrats are agitating for investigations and prosecutions. Republicans are arguing that torture works (pivoting from, without completely abandoning, the now-untenable “we do not torture” refrain). And Obama is both parsing up a storm and trying to stay above it all.
I empathize – Obama is trying to accomplish a lot, and the torture debate can only suck attention from much bigger issues, while opening up political and social divisions the president is trying to put behind him. It may even make more sense, in terms of building a lasting anti-torture consensus, to have less accountability rather than more. But this process requires clarity, not endless caveats. How, for example, does Obama’s don’t-prosecute-the-interrogators-policy apply to the period before the legally enabling memos were written? A process has begun here; more disclosures will follow the ones we’ve already seen. It will be messy and politically contentious – exactly the kind of thing we know Obama doesn’t like one bit. But that is how democracy works, and Obama would be advised, to the degree he can, to simply get out of the way.
