digby — President Obama's greatest torture mistake

This may be Obama's biggest mistake, bar none. It's colossal and will reverberate through time, affecting America as deeply as the moral rot of slavery Native American genocide whose aftermath festers are the heart of the culture and remains an indictment of "American exceptionalism" globally. It's hypocritical to say, "That's no who we really are,"without self-correction.

Here's something I didn't know, from Jane Mayer's piece this week in the New Yorker:

There was a way to address the matter that might have avoided much of the partisan trivialization. In a White House meeting in early 2009, Greg Craig, President Obama’s White House Counsel, recommended the formation of an independent commission. Nearly every adviser in the room endorsed the idea, including such national-security hawks as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, and the President’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. Leon Panetta, the C.I.A. director at the time, also supported it. Obama, however, said that he didn’t want to seem to be taking punitive measures against his predecessor, apparently because he still hoped to reach bipartisan agreement on issues such as closing Guantánamo.

What was he thinking?

We can't know what was going through his mind. But if this is true, it was one of his biggest errors in judgement. We are now living in a country that endorses torture and, at best, sees it as a political issue. And the world knows that if the US Government continues to use it, the people will back it. That has made us far more vulnerable and far less safe. We are an extremely powerful rogue nation that openly says we don't care about the rule of law or international norms of behavior.…

Back in the day people used to rhetorically ask: "Why do they hate us?" and people would either shrug their shoulders or sputter about how we are misunderstood. Today if someone asks the question, the ready answer is: Because the US is a barbaric superpower that will stop at nothing, not even torture. I can't argue against that.

Hillary Clinton thinks our problem as a culture is that we don't tell the good stories about ourselves anymore. Since more than half the people in this country are torture advocates, I'm not sure how you make any case for our "goodness" anymore. Good luck with trying to paper this over.

Hullabaloo
President Obama's greatest torture mistake

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