From ABC’s Jake Tapper:
President Obama met with White House counsel Greg Craig and other members of the White House counsel team last week and told them that he had second thoughts about the decision to hand over photographs of detainee abuse to the ACLU, per a judge’s order, and had changed his mind.
The president “believes their release would endanger our troops,” a White House official says, adding that the president “believes that the national security implications of such a release have not been fully presented to the court.”
These photos would have been graphic evidence that detainee abuse was not limited to Abu Ghraib, and not just the result of A Few Bad Apples.
The idea that the release of these photos would “endanger our troops” is clearly an excuse for trying to tamp down the torture story for political reasons. Not only that, it’s an insulting excuse.
The more Obama covers for his predessor’s crimes, the more he becomes an accessory. More importantly, if Obama’s cover-up job works, and Cheney is left unopposed in his arguments for torture, Obama will have virtually ensured these crimes will be commited again.
4 Comments
Is ‘accessory’ really the right word? Isn’t he just obstructing justice?
It was pretty obvious from Abu Gharib that this wasn’t a few bad apples. They made those soldiers into scapegoats. No way would something like that go on without approval up the chain of command.
I do believe that legally speaking, Obama is an “accessory after the fact” if he knows crimes were committed and works to conceal them.
Newsweek had an article on how we have become desensitized to the acts of torture since the original release of the Abu Ghraib photos. Whereas we were appalled that these acts could be committed by the United States, we have now accepted the practices and are arguing their effectiveness.
Yeah that pretty crazy, but I think a lot of the arguing effectiveness nonsense is due to the partisan hackery of all of this. It became a Republican/Democrat issue because we had a Republican President (like they want to claim him anyways…). Now you have people who feel like they have to stick up for torture of all things because the guy who did it played for their team.
They still fear showing us similar photos though, as evidenced by Obama’s recent stalling of the release of these new photos. Personally I think seeing the photos is the reality check people need.