Ominous Signs on Obama Torture Policy

With Obama's win comes great promise on the anti-torture front. According to Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat who chairs the select Appropriations subcommittee that recommends intelligence funding:

While an executive order will not remove the need for legislation on the issue, it is a way for President-elect Obama to put an immediate halt to our government’s use of torture during interrogations and to prevent secret detentions. By exercising his authority and acting quickly, he will begin to restore our moral leadership on the issue and repair some of the harm that has been done to our international reputation.

Will Obama follow through on his August 2007 pledge to "close Guantánamo, reject the Military Commissions Act, and adhere to the Geneva Conventions"? As post election euphoria fades, a picture has slowly emerged of what Obama's policies on torture will likely be. In a word: troubling.

Early warning signs came from AP reportage of plans for new, unneccesary "terror courts" and a NYT piece on "preventive detention of terrorism suspects". More ominous news came from the Wall Street Journal. According to a “current government official familiar with the transition" interviewed by that paper, "Obama may decide he wants to keep the road open in certain cases for the CIA to use techniques not approved by the military, but with much greater oversight.”

Will Obama take the "centrist" approach and yield to more conservative factions demanding continuity of the torture regime? The speculative WSJ article, noted Glen Greenwald, is not "evidence of what Obama will do, but it is definitely compelling evidence that people close to him -- those whom he has chosen to be influential -- are pushing him in that direction."

Chief among these pushers are John Brennan-- former aide to CIA Director George Tenet, Obama's transition chief for intelligence policy, and the leading candidate to replace Mike McConnell as Obama's Director of National Intelligence. Jane Mayer last year labelled Brennan a "supporter" of "the CIA’s interrogation and detention program". Today Greenwald put Lexis-Nexis to good use and dug up the following views of Brennan on rendition and torture:

The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, 5 December 2005:

MARGARET WARNER: So was Secretary Rice correct today when she called [rendition] a vital tool in combating terrorism?

JOHN BRENNAN: I think it's an absolutely vital tool. I have been intimately familiar now over the past decade with the cases of rendition that the U.S. Government has been involved in. And I can say without a doubt that it has been very successful as far as producing intelligence that has saved lives.

CBS News:

CBS NEWS: Despite [torture, rendition victim Maher] Arar's experience, this former counterterrorism official says "rendition" does have its place.

Mr. JOHN BRENNAN (CBS News Terrorism Analyst, Former Director, National Counterterrorism Center): I think it allows us to have the option to move a person who is involved in terrorism or terrorism-related activities to a country where they can be effectively questioned or prosecuted.

CBS News, Novemeber 2007:

Mr. BRENNAN: Well, the CIA has acknowledged that it has detained about 100 terrorists since 9/11, and about a third of them have been subjected to what the CIA refers to as enhanced interrogation tactics, and only a small proportion of those have in fact been subjected to the most serious types of enhanced procedures.

SMITH: Right. And you say some of this has born fruit.

Mr. BRENNAN: There have been a lot of information that has come out from these interrogation procedures that the agency has in fact used against the real hard-core terrorists. It has saved lives. And let's not forget, these are hardened terrorists who have been responsible for 9/11, who have shown no remorse at all for the deaths of 3,000 innocents.

Given his history, it is likely Brennan will advise Obama to "stay the course" on torture-- publicly swear off its use, perhaps allow limited investigations into Bush torture policy, but ALSO allow for the CIA to continue to kidnap and use "enhanced" torture behind closed doors when the "need arises". Will Obama follow this path?

Amy Goodman is among the deafening chorus who hopes he does not. In her most recent column, she linked torture to its dark roots in US history and highlighted the deep significance of repudiating torture today. She concludes:

The executive orders he issues will set the tone of his presidency and could usher in a new era. Human-rights groups are calling for the closing of the Guantanamo prison camp and CIA “black sites,” where torture has been commonplace. Which brings us back to slavery. When Frederick Douglass, the renowned abolitionist, was young, he was enslaved on a plantation on Maryland's Eastern Shore, called Mount Misery, owned by Edward Covey, a notorious “slave breaker.” There, physical and psychological torture were standard. That property, today, is owned by Donald Rumsfeld, the former secretary of defense who was one of the key architects of the U.S. military's program of torture and detention.

With the stroke of a pen on Inauguration Day, President Obama could outlaw torture. It would be a tribute to those slaves who built his new home, the White House, a tribute to those slaves who built the U.S. Capitol Building, a tribute to those who were tortured at Mount Misery.