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  Searching for a Strategy: Obama Trips Over Bush Torture Legacy

Searching for a Strategy Obama Trips Over Bush Torture Legacy

By Hans Hoyng, Britta Sandberg and Gabor Steingart

Part 2: The Swan Song of 'Change'

This means that US forces can continue to hold terror suspects without charge at the Bagram prison camp in Afghanistan. It means that the CIA's interrogation specialists will no longer face the prospect of criminal prosecution. And the government lawyers who issued briefs in which they declared the torture methods to be legally acceptable can likely expect little more than slap on the wrist.

These revelations, though, represent no less than the swan song of "change," the mantra of President Barack Obama.

The series of about-faces has been the source of turmoil in Washington with Republicans and Democrats now accusing each other of endangering US national security and the lives of American soldiers. The president's fellow Democrats are using their majorities in the Senate and the House of Representatives to prevent him from bringing so much as one of the remaining 240 Guantanamo prisoners to the United States. In response, Obama noted -- unsuccessfully -- that he could hardly convince other countries to accept a few of the detainees as long as his own country remained unwilling to do so.

Nothing is easy for Obama these days, not even the closing of Guantanamo. Of the roughly 770 prisoners once incarcerated there, about 500 have already been released without charges and sent back to their native countries.

Experts have divided the remaining 240 prisoners into three groups. The first group comprises 50 to 80 detainees whose releases have in fact been approved but who cannot be flown back to their native countries, because they are likely to face torture or other forms of persecution there. They include 17 Uighurs who the Obama administration has asked Germany to accept.

Release Not an Option

For the detainees in the second group, there is insufficient evidence for a trial. Nevertheless, they are considered sufficiently dangerous that releasing them is not seen as an option. In discussing the possible transfer of detainees to the United States, Attorney General Eric Holder said: "We are not going to do anything that will endanger the American people."

The third group comprises prisoners who could be put on trial, in principle. However US federal courts could decline to hear such cases because detainee confessions were made under torture. This hurdle was one factor in the assessment by Obama's legal advisors that military tribunals may offer the only solution to the dilemma.

Last Friday, the president cited a less convincing reason to retain the tribunals when he said in a statement: "Military commissions have a long tradition in the United States." It was, however, exactly such traditions Obama intended to abandon. But he also ordered that the tribunals be suspended for four months to allow the Pentagon to revise its procedures for the trials at Guantanamo.

One of the likely conclusions of this review is already clear: The tribunals will no longer allow as evidence all information obtained from the prisoners during extreme interrogations. In addition, the defendants will be given greater latitude in the selection of their defense attorneys, and they will be permitted to refuse to give potentially self-incriminating testimony.

These are improvements, and yet they are a far cry from the Obama administration's original promises.

"We are currently experiencing the continuation of a three steps forward, four steps back strategy," says attorney Scott Horton, an advisor to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is suing for the release of the 44 torture photos. "Obama is simply afraid that the torture debate will overshadow everything else, and that's something he desperately wants to prevent."

The ACLU has already seen to it that four torture memorandums written in 2002 and 2005 were released: documents aiming to provide legal backing to the dubious interrogation methods applied after Sept. 11, 2001. According to Obama's closest advisors at the White House, the president spent four weeks agonizing over his decision regarding the memos.

Not Far Enough

At the time, many advisors warned the president not to release the documents. Perhaps he did so because he still believed that he could keep his promise of transparency. The release did in fact unleash a debate over torture and responsibility, partly because Obama went only halfway, promptly announcing that those members of the intelligence community responsible for the torture would not be prosecuted. Fellow Democrats, who would like to see George W. Bush put on trial, criticized the new president for not having gone far enough.

Meanwhile, Obama's critics in the Republican Party argued that he had gone much too far. Since then, hardly a day has passed without former Vice President Richard Cheney, speaking in his sonorous voice, coolly warning against new terrorist attacks. His aim is preventive, implying that if al-Qaida were to launch another attack on US soil it would be the fault of this president, Barack Obama.

Cheney has been passionate in defending what he calls "astonishingly successful interrogation methods," as if sleep deprivation and waterboarding were indispensable elements of American conservatism.

A Strategy to Leave Bush Behind

It has not been forgotten, however, that many members of Congress were informed about the new treatment of terror suspects at the time, and that they did not raise any objections. Nancy Pelosi, the now-powerful Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives, was also present at a September 2002 CIA briefing on the interrogation methods. But she now claims that she was not aware that waterboarding was being used.

Obama probably believed that he could more effectively control the public debate over the past and roll back the veil more systematically. But that was an illusion and a mistake that could prove to be a serious miscalculation. He too is haunted by the failings of the superpower. And Obama, as cool a strategist as he is, still lacks a convincing strategy.

What should he do? The president has a few options. He can appoint a special investigator to examine human rights violations during the Bush administration. But that could trigger something Obama wants to avoid: a heated debate that could divide America in the midst of the most severe economic crisis in many decades, a division that could ultimately become deeper even than the one that split the country during the Iraq war.

The alternative would be an investigative commission that would look into what happened at Guantanamo, Bagram and elsewhere and propose how to deal with those responsible. The United States took the same approach with the Iraq war, when a panel of respected Republicans and Democrats subjected the war to a general review.

Obama the strategist will have to come up with something to leave behind the Bush legacy.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan