The President's remark about the Cambridge police department was justifiable

Tom Shales, the television critic for The Washington Post, who's reviewed every presidential press conference for over 30 years, called President Obama's remark last night about the Cambridge Police Department's arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates "refreshingly blunt." But many in the media have railed against the president for calling the arrest "stupid." Was it? The President obviously based his remark on the fact that the policeman in question must be presumed to have been acting within what he believed was departmental policy. So the president was entitled to presume that that authorized arresting someone who had not otherwise committed a crime but who was loudly criticizing the officer. Is that "stupid"? It is, unless you believe that free speech about police officers to their face should be illegal. I would submit to you that any policeman who believes it is appropriate to arrest someone who is criticizing them too harshly had better opt for a line of work in a more sensitive setting, like a hair salon or a toy store.

Let's not forget that conservatives have been brow-beating us for decades about the sacrosanct status of anyone who wears a uniform -- that they can do no wrong, are the shining emblems of our national honor, and all the rest. Of the great majority of police officers, this may well be true. But we should not forget the fact that police brutality is a worldwide reality: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cases_of_police_brutality. Policemen have the capacity to overreact, just as those they encounter.

I once dated a woman who had been a police officer in a major American city for ten years, until she resigned because of physical harassment from male officers. She once told me: "Do not ever argue with a male police officer. Half the men on any police force are in that line of work because they enjoy physical confrontations. They are just waiting to be challenged." Was it stupid for Gates to yell at the officer? Yes. Was it stupid to arrest him? Yes. The President was right.

Obama challenges the Iranian regime's repression

Today President Obama quite forcefully though subtly challenged the Iranian regime, in his comments on events there. Instead of opining on whether he thought the elections were fraudulent, he focused on the issue of whether the regime's response to the protests was legitimate, suggesting that violence against peaceful protesters (his deft reframing of the issue of violence) was against a universal value, the right to dissent. He also said, "...there appears to be a sense on the part of people who were so hopeful and so engaged and so committed to democracy who now feel betrayed..." In other words, the Mousavi presidential campaign lifted the people's hope that their voices would count, and now they feel betrayed. Obama's test of a satisfactory course of events could therefore be defined this way, as if it were a statement to the regime: If what you do from now on sharpens that sense of betrayal, you will lose your people's trust and thus your legitimacy.

How could another Ahmadinejad anointment be anything but another betrayal? Every one of us with access to blogs or the media -- and especially to Iranian bloggers -- should keep repeating Obama's equation and perhaps lend it more specific political content, because the part of the regime not glued to Ahmadinejad needs to see that they have only one way to regain the people's trust, and that's to order a re-vote.

Right now the movement in the streets is based mainly on political rage -- it doesn't have a concrete goal. If the goal were a Guardian Council order for a re-vote, it would paint the regime into a corner -- courtesy of Obama's equation.

Cheney Unhinged

Self-righteousness is necessarily facilitated in intelligent people by a lack of self-awareness: The person who proudly and dogmatically claims he is right about a matter that otherwise rouses a respectable debate is usually a person who doesn't notice his own pride and dogmatism. So it was with former Vice President Dick Cheney's speech today, exonerating himself and his late administration (which in George W. Bush's present silence seems as if it belonged chiefly to Cheney) of any misdeeds in prosecuting their war on terrorists. He maligned the motives and mischaracterized the statements of Democrats, damned President Obama with faint praise when he wasn't implying that Obama is naive, ridiculed the president (without naming him) for using "euphemisms" in referring to the war on terror -- moments after the president said that it was indeed a war -- and then turned around and kept using the Republicans' insistent euphemism about torture: "enhanced interrogation techniques" (which congressional Republicans are now shortening to "EIT's", not even wanting to use that phrase).

While in the middle of a speech half-devoted to unctuous and sarcastic dismissal of those who disagree with him, and while denouncing unnamed individuals for "phony moralizing" about torture, Cheney's seeming inability to notice the ironies in his own language led him to say this: President Obama's decision "to completely rule out enhanced interrogation techniques...is recklessness cloaked in righteousness." To paraphrase one of the wisest people who ever lived, he who cannot see the stick in his own eye tends to complain loudly about the mote in someone else's.

Apart from condemning the new Administration's refusal to use "enhanced interrogation techniques", the other half of Cheney's speech dredged up the dread of further terrorist catastrophe that was widespread after 9/11 and warned of even worse future attacks which he implied were more likely because of President Obama's policies. This was the strategy of his speech: Recreate fear of an external enemy which he accused the present administration of taking lightly, in part to distract his listeners from the self-inflicted and widely acknowledged disasters of his own administration. Cheney even had the temerity to suggest that having a public debate about torture would exhibit "weakness and opportunity" to terrorists thinking of attacking again. In other words, free democratic discussion must be stopped, because it might get us killed. This is a man whose sensibility seems so drenched in fear of our enemies that he believes it justifies every bloody method wreaked upon them. It is a philosophy that sacrifices the principles he professes to defend in order, supposedly, to protect them. As one American military officer famously said in Vietnam, "We destroyed the village in order to save it."

But the macabre heart of Cheney's speech was this: "You cannot keep just some nuclear-armed terrorists out of the United States, you must keep every nuclear-armed terrorist out of the United States...When just a single clue that goes unlearned…one lead that goes unpursued…can bring on catastrophe -- it's no time for splitting differences. " In other words: Obama won't torture, so he will cause a nuclear attack on an American city. This speech must therefore be recognized for what it is: the single most demagogic political attack on an American president, by another American political leader, in living memory. That its central charge was insinuated and not directly stated does not dilute its malice. Cheney did not have the courage frontally to accuse the president of what he argued would be the consequences of the president's actions. But cowardice is often found in those who predicate their arguments on fear and loathing.

The mainstream news media seem oblivious to these back alley methods of Dick Cheney's political rhetoric, so mesmerized do they appear to be by his buttoned-down corporate style. But make no mistake about it: The former vice president realizes that the new president is well along in forging an entirely different public consensus about how the United States should conduct itself in the world. It isn't clear if the fear-ridden, hostility-feeding language which Cheney deploys arises from his own need for self-justification, or whether it may be part of a deliberate strategy by him and his acolytes in the conservative movement to try to reignite the recriminations and hostilities that surged back and forth through our political debates when he was in office. But whatever the reason, Cheney's belligerent speech today raises the stakes for those who would prefer to have America steered by the rationality and composure of President Obama's approach to the risks and threats facing the United States. The bile aimed at Barack Obama by Dick Cheney, and the rancor against him that it may further stir on the right, should make clear to all those who prefer a stable new course for our country that the president deserves our support as never before. We have to make the choice we made last November again, and again -- because those who lost have not conceded.

More on Obama's decision-making on torture issues...

Barack Obama is not a devious man. The chief reason he gave for changing his mind and declining to release the 29 photos showing American soldiers torturing Afghans and Iraqis was that military commanders, particularly in Afghanistan, asked him not to do so, because they felt it would heighten the risk of violence to their soldiers serving there. Because the Republicans had trashed Obama six ways to Sunday about his lack of national security experience for two solid years during the presidential campaign, with McCain practically accusing him of being an unrealistic peacenik, it was inevitable that he would have to build a trusting relationship with senior military commanders once he took office. So far he's done that skillfully. Declining to release photos now which the White House fully expects to come out later anyway is a tactical concession to these commanders, a sign of his respect for their judgment. And it's also a way to maintain distance between the White House and the developing four-alarm media circus about Cheney and his torture-defending road show, which could otherwise engulf the Obama presidency at this point if the president became a central actor in determining precisely what will happen in adducing evidence that could lead to meaningful legal actions against Bush officials.

The political moment for firmly establishing this presidency as likely to be formidable and successful is still fragile. A lot of political insiders are extremely impressed with how Obama is handling himself, and the public seems to agree. But the Washington press corps and the broadcast media are another matter. They're mischaracterizing what he is doing and saying on a daily basis, in their nightly cartoon strip of our politics. He has to maintain as much distance from that level of coverage as possible. The torture debate has already levitated away from the factual record and become an inside-the-Beltway slanging match. The only way to rescue it is for there to be patient, exhaustive congressional hearings, which Pat Leahy and others are organizing as we speak. If Obama were to instruct DOJ to start investigations, then the media would depict Obama as Inspector Javert pursuing the accursed Cheney, and the public would believe that Obama had been willingly caught up in another Washington political obsession rather than doing the job he was elected to do. The White House staying out of this debate as much as possible actually helps the debate about Bush's torture practices to be less political and more about real evidence.

In American history no president or vice president immediately after the completion of his term has ever been the subject of investigations -- initiated by the new administration -- for criminal violations. Until substantial evidence of that wrong-doing is evident to the public, any initiative by Obama for such investigations would set off a political firestorm not seen since Watergate. Let the evidence accumulate. Let the public come gradually to a judgment. Sometimes it's right for presidents to follow public opinion instead of lead it, particularly if collateral damage to the president's other priorities -- in the form of diminished news coverage and poisoning the political atmosphere -- can thereby be avoided. Obama was not elected to be an avenging angel imposing retribution on the political leaaders he supplanted. He was elected to save the economy, restore America's positive influence in the world, and change -- not reinforce -- our delirious political culture.

Why Obama didn't order release of the "torture photos"

Every elected democratic leader in history has required the respect and loyalty of the senior combat commanders of his military, especially if there are active military conflicts which he has to manage. Afghanistan may be in peril of slipping back into chaos or control by the Taliban, thanks to Bush's neglect of that conflict and the resources consumed by his war in Iraq. That could lead to the reconstitution of a terrorist infrastructure in Afghanistan and vastly strengthen the Taliban position in Pakistan, where nuclear weapons are stored. That would not only defeat President Obama in '12, it would return the neo-con gang to power in Washington.

Barack Obama campaigned on the promise of finishing the job in Afghanistan, i.e. stabilizing the country to secure it against repossession of any of its territory by transnational terrorists. If you liked any of Obama's promises, you cannot fault him for wanting to make good on all of them. Two senior U.S. commanders responsible for Afghanistan asked Obama not to release the photos of U.S. soldiers torturing Afghan prisoners, because they were afraid that would endanger American soldiers -- by stimulating new acts of terrorism or other violence against them. It is not serious to believe that any president would disregard such a request.

The president knows that the torture photos are likely to be released eventually anyway. Not releasing them now does not give Dick Cheney or any Bush official any measure of protection against whatever sanctions can be taken against them by foreign or U.S. prosecutors, or further exposure of their crimes by congressional investigators. But by removing himself further from the causal sequence that leads to those hearings and investigations, he denies the news media any ability to claim that he is using his presidency to persecute his predecessor's -- a claim that the media as well as the Republicans would be sure to make. To have a successful or even historic presidency, he has to use his window of peak political power to begin to solve the central problems felt by the majority who elected him, and that means the economy, health care, and the other long-neglected public needs that jeopardize this country's ability not only to recover from this serious recession but to compete in a world changing faster than Bill Clinton can talk.

The choice that President Obama faced was not complex: Successful political leaders minimize political risks in order to keep dry the powder of their influence over all the other political actors in government who have to be herded toward the changes he wants to make. They also have to make sure that even non-political actors in the system, such as influential military leaders (or the heads of independent regulatory agencies, or even Supreme Court justices), believe that he respects their professional judgment -- or else they will be trashing his, behind his back. To release these photos over the objection of military commanders would have made more difficult the president's task of gaining more of their confidence for tougher decisions ahead where he may have to turn down their advice.

Torture is a Crime, Not a "Daring Proposal"

Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, America's most prestigious private organization commonly believed to represent the foerign policy establishment, has waded into the torture debate. He says:

The issue is whether those who argued that such techniques were not illegal -- and therefore should be available -- ought to be tried. They should not. To begin with, prosecution of Justice Department officials would have a chilling effect on future U.S. government officials. Few would be brave or foolhardy enough to put forward daring proposals that one day could be judged illegal. Putting things down in writing is a useful intellectual exercise that is also central to good decision-making. With the threat of prosecution, serious memos on controversial matters will increasingly become the exception rather than the rule. Prosecution would also set a terrible precedent. One would have thought today's politics sufficiently partisan and poisonous without adding legal threats to the mix. Even knowing this was a possibility would discourage people from entering government in the first place.

This sounds reasonable but is in fact outrageous. It has become clear that Bush Administration political appointees in the Department of Justice and in the White House prepared, endorsed and accepted policy recommendations that authorized "enhanced interrogation techniques" that are now regarded as internationally criminal prosecutable torture by a preponderant number of legal authorities and observers in the U.S. as well as in the governments of our allies. The hair-splitting and rhetorical convolutions in which the DOJ Bush lawyers engaged, as shown by publicly disclosed documents, suggest that they were aware of the potential that violations of law could be involved. For Mr. Haass to describe the endorsement and recommendation of potentially illegal acts as "a useful intellectual exercise that is...central to good decision-making" would be an ironic though understandable statement if the government were an authoritarian regime, but not if the government is democratic and bases its laws on the enforceability of human rights guaranteed by its own Constitution.

This has nothing to do with "partisan and poisonous politics." It has to do with whether the United States will or will not respect the rule of law and the international conventions it has endorsed which condemn torture. This is not an issue which can be decided as a matter of what is convenient for the careers of policy advisors. It is a question of fundamental values. Mr. Haass seems to have had difficulty noticing that.

The Republican Party: Defenders of Torture

Because the Republicans are now explicitly defending torture under Bush and Cheney (while using the euphemism, "enhanced interrogation techniques"), since it allegedly succeeded in getting information useful in stopping terrorist attacks (which of course cannot be disclosed), they are implicitly asserting that the ends justify the means. But if the same people who choose the means also define the ultimate ends (i.e. win a nebulous and perpetual "war on terror"), then how does even that justification become an enforceable standard? It's just another way of saying that if they have power, the Republicans will do anything to achieve what they have decided is in the national interest. This is a road to the same authoritarianism that they accuse, rightly or wrongly, Iran and Venezuela of practicing. So, they abandon morality in public life even as they demand that we practice their version of it in our private lives (e.g. stop being gay, practice abstinence), and they commit the rankest hypocrisy by asking for state power to torture you if you're suspected of being a terrorist, even as, ridiculously, they accuse President Obama --- who refuses to torture -- of being a dictator. This is a political party in an advanced stage of serious alienation from any rational standards of consistency, logic or public ethics. It has also abandoned respect for the rule of law and rendered itself unfit for national power so long as its present leaders and thinkers would set the agenda.