Video: Former President Carter on Detainee Abuse

Speaking on CNN, Jimmy Carter, the US President from 1977 to 1981 and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, made a gentle but challenging contribution to the debate over the release of photographs of detainee abuse (""I don't agree with [President Obama], but I certainly don't criticize him for making that decision") and an investigation of the Bush Administration's torture programme: "What I would like to see is a complete examination of what did happen, the identification of any perpetrators of crimes against our own laws or against international law. And then after all that's done, decide whether or not there should be any prosecutions."

Today's Bush's-Glorious-Iraq-Surge Story: We Can Kick North Korea's Butt

In the never-ending fantasy game of Why George Bush Really, Really Got It Right on Iraq, even as the casualty level for US troops reach their highest point since September 2008, former Bush official Peter Feaver takes today's top prize:

I see [Obama] as having slightly more options now for dealing with North Korea than he otherwise might have precisely because Bush reversed the trajectory in Iraq. To be sure, the progress in Iraq is still fragile and reversible -- and there are ominous signs of that reversibility with the uptick in violence in the months since Obama codified a rigid withdrawal timeline. But the success of Bush’s surge strategy (crediting, of course, the courageous efforts of General Petraeus, General Odierno, and Ambassador Crocker, not to mention the brave men and women deployed in Iraq, who actually implemented the strategy) has gone some way to restoring America’s global strategic leverage. At a minimum, it seems to me inarguable that our strategic leverage is greater now than it would have been if we continued on the old trajectory.

I've read Feaver's gung-ho piece a dozen times for a sign of logic, but it appears that there is none, only a glowing path from soldiers in Baghdad to dropping bombs on Pyongyang:

The truth is that the availability of U.S. ground forces is at most a secondary factor in limiting our options in North Korea. The South Korean army provides all of the ground forces needed to defeat North Korea, but only at horrific cost -- a cost that probably no South Korean leader would ever choose unless North Korea launched its own unprovoked invasion. Without an active and willing South Korean ally committed to the fight, there is no viable ground-based option for the United States. In other words, our military options for North Korea are air-based and our air options are not as constrained by the Iraq (and now Afghan) surge.

Obama and National Security: "This Guy Has to Show Some Stones Somewhere Along the Line."

I was struck by this piece by Matt Taibbi on AlterNet as soon as I reached its conclusion. Possibly that because of its contrast to much of the "mainstream" reaction to President Obama's national security approach, highlighted in his 21 May speech, which has been insipid or even craven, reducing the issues to a valiant centrist higher ground against both Cheney-ist forces on the "right" and deluded liberals --- see, for example, the shallow warbling of the Washington Post's David Broder about Obama as Commander-in-Chief facing down the "sustained outcry from the left".

Taibbi's polemic is blunt and undiplomatic, and it should be considered in the context of comments from our own readers such as, "Obama is now responsible for 300 million lives. That’s a heavy burden, and one can forgive him for struggling a bit in transitioning from opposition to governance." Still Taibbi's plain talks brings out my concern, "It was absolutely imperative, from a public relations standpoint if nothing else, that Obama immediately repudiate these practices, design some kind of due process to deal with the already incarcerated prisoners, and show the world that what happened during the Bush years was an insane aberration."

No More Compromise -- Obama Must Wholly Reject Bush's Dictator Policies

The recent haggling over Guantanamo Bay is such classic Democratic Party politics, it almost makes you want to laugh. Almost, except that it’s, you know, revolting. Eight years of Clintonian squirming was bad enough, but now we have Barack Obama, smoking Habeas Corpus and not inhaling it.

Why is the Gitmo decision classic Democratic Party thinking? Because when certain of us said we wanted Gitmo closed, we sort of meant a change in policy -- we didn’t mean just physically closing the plant, moving the prisoners elsewhere, and leaving the policies essentially unchanged. This is what this generation of Democrats does every time: every time they come to a fork in the road, they try to take it.

There’s always some sort of semantic twist involved with their policies, an asterisk, some kind of leprechaun trick to get around doing the simple right thing. They’re all for gay rights, and then once the lights come on, they’ve basically codified the closet by ushering in Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

They campaign against the war in Iraq, promise to get us out, and say they were against it all along -- and then once they get in power, they start using words like eventually and in 4-6 years and once the situation stabilizes. Later it turns out that what they meant by being against the war all along was their conviction that we should have invaded on a Thursday instead of a Tuesday, or some such bullshit.

Now there’s this Gitmo business. This, folks, just isn’t that tough a call. The prison (and the much less publicized archipelago of hard sites in foreign countries where more terror suspects are held) was a symbol of everything wrong and stupid about the Bush administration. Snatching people up by force and dumping them in rocks on the middle of the ocean without due process is the kind of thing that was last done by "civilized" cultures back in the days of the Roman Empire; since then it’s been the exclusive province of sociopathic third-world dictators like Stalin and Mobutu Sese Seko.

It was absolutely imperative, from a public relations standpoint if nothing else, that Obama immediately repudiate these practices, design some kind of due process to deal with the already incarcerated prisoners, and show the world that what happened during the Bush years was an insane aberration, a result of our having accidentally elected an emotionally retarded sadist to the White House.

Instead, Obama is on his way to doing exactly the wrong thing. He’s going to make a show of closing the base, but retain the underlying idea by keeping some of the prisoners in indefinite legal purgatory. In some ways this is worse than what Bush did, because Bush at least took a clear stand -- he was nuts and thought this was the right thing to do. No matter how you look at Obama’s decision, it’s weighed somewhere along the line by political calculation. Either he thinks indefinite decision is right and he’s bowing to public appeals by closing the base, or else he thinks it’s wrong and is bowing to opposition outcry by maintaining the old policy.

It’s one thing to change your mind or play both sides of the fence on matters that don’t involve human lives, on theoretical/hypothetical campaign issues, but another thing to do it with actual incarcerated human beings as the key variable in the political equation.

I still like Obama, in a lot of ways. Having a president with less ability to inspire public confidence at a time like this, with our economy in such a death spiral, would be a disaster; God knows where we’d be right now with a McCain or a Mike Huckabee at the helm. But this guy has to show some stones somewhere along the line. He has to just forget the DC game and just take a clear stand on an issue like this sometime. He’s kind of running out of time to rescue his all-important first impression.

UPDATED Hidden US Torture Photos: The Story (and the Images) Continue

The Salon Gallery of Torture Photos and Video

Related Post: Torture - The Hidden Photos Emerge

UPDATE: Jake Tapper, the White House correspondent for ABC News in the US, has just posted a blog which graphically illustrates the complicity of many in the US media --- wittingly or unwittingly --- in either missing or setting aside the main story. Instead of identifying and focusing on the main story, the content and context of the 2000 photographs and videotapes of detainee abuse, Tapper goes for the sideshow of the White House trashing of the Daily Telegraph's interview with General Taguba.

Last month Enduring America paid a good deal of attention to the Obama White House's decision to defy a court order and hold back 44 photographs, amongst hundreds and possibly thousands, of the abuse of detainees in US facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries. We linked to Italian newspapers with a dozen of the images, posting the two most moderate --- the story become our fifth-biggest in our eight months on the Web.

Last week, there was another series of developments --- some illuminating, some confusing, all disturbing. It began on Thursday when The Daily Telegraph of London ran an article based on an interview with General Antonio Taguba, who led the 2004 internal investigation of the abuses at Abu Ghraib. According to the newspaper, Taguba said the photos showed ""torture, abuse, rape and every indecency". The Daily Telegraph highlighted "a soldier apparently raping a female prisoner, a translator apparently raping a male prisoner, and instances of sexual abuse involving objects".

None of this is new. As Taguba carried out his initial investigation five years ago, there were leaks pointing to the content, in thousands of photographs and some video recordings, outlined by The Daily Telegraph. Indeed, the electronic magazine Salon published many of the images in 279 pictures and 19 videos. However, as the Iraq conflict escalated, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld survived calls for his firing, and a few low-ranking soldiers were handed prison sentences for Abu Ghraib, the unreleased photos receded from memory, let alone vision.

What made this story notable, five years later, was the reaction of the Obama Administration. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs was quick to say that The Daily Telegraph "mischaracterised" the 44 photos involved in the court action. Salon, the same magazine that had published "The Abu Ghraib Files", then got in on the act. It interviewed Taguba, who said, "The photographs in that lawsuit, I have not seen." Instead, "he was referring to the hundreds of images he reviewed as an investigator of the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq". Gibbs then eagerly e-mailed reporters, "Both the Department of Defense and the White House have said the [Daily Telegraph] article was wrong, and now the individual who was purported to be the source of the article has said it’s inaccurate.

Thus, partly because Salon wanted to protect its 2006 exclusive and primarily because the White House wants to keep the story far, far away, the spin was put in motion: nothing new to see here, move along.

Actually, the story should be easy to see, amidst the manoeuvres of politicians and journalists. The 44 photos are important, not necessarily because of their specific images --- a Pentagon official maintains, "These photographs, while disturbing enough, are relatively inconsequential compared to those which were already released in 2004 and 2006" --- but because of the precedent that would be set by their release. For once they are out, the thousands of  photos and tapes will inevitably follow, since the US Government has no legal or political standing to withhold them. As Taguba, who opposes the release of the material, says, "The mere description of these pictures is horrendous enough, take my word for it.”

And, even beyond the visual shocks that lies in the full archive, this will be a big, very new deal. Salon's 2006 gallery is limited to images from Abu Ghraib, so the pictorial illusion can be maintained that it was just one prison (and, beyond that, the political illusion of the Obama White House, following its predecessor, that it was just a few rogue troops who have been disciplined for their crimes). The unvarnished, complete gallery would establish how many places where this abuse occurred, from Iraq to Afghanistan to "undisclosed locations" and possibly to Guantanamo Bay. It would establish, once and for all, that these were not isolated incidents but part of a systematic process put in motion not in Baghdad but in Washington.

There may, however, be a twist in the tale. Scott Horton of The Daily Beast, who is carrying out a personal battle with Salon over the investigation, claims --- via "a senior Pentagon official" --- that there is an intra-Administration contest over the photos. While General Raymond Odierno, the US commander in Iraq, was able to block the release of the 44 images in the court action by arguing that US troops would be endangered, General David Petraeus, the overall US commander in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia, favours disclosure to "lance this boil". So, according to this official, Obama's announcement on 14 May that he would defy the court order is "a stall tactic: he intends to release them eventually, even if he prevails in court, once the situation on the ground improves."

Hmmm....I'm sceptical, as this feels like another delaying tactic rather than an eventual acceptance that the photos will have to be acknowledged, in public view as well in a court case. "Once the situation on the ground improves", given conditions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, becomes a Never-Never Land of transparency.

So instead there will be the drip-drip-drip of more stories which are not necessarily new, not necessarily exclusive, but still important. There will be more White House denials and misinformation. The Bush Administration men and women behind the photos will escape a public reckoning, and the suspicion --- abroad if not within the US --- will build that President Obama's promise of "the right balance between transparency and national security" is very, very tilted indeed.

Torture Flashback: Putting Away (and Laughing at) the Pelosi "Scandal"

Torture: The Pelosi “Controversy” in One Sentence

You may recall our aversion to any mention of the Bushmen/Republican-whipped-up pseudo-controversy over the complicity of the Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, in the Bush Administration's torture programme, apart from this question, "If Nancy Pelosi is an accomplice to a felony…..who are the felons?"

It appears the GOP attack dogs, the sailors on the Dick Cheney alternative ship of state, and even Karl Rove feel they have gotten as much as they can out of their diversion, so we thought we'd give it a farewell, with the proper perspective, from the superb Sam Seder:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzR3A3DcJg4[/youtube]