Obama’s education from the military on torture
Fascinating account by Jane Mayer:
On Thursday, President Barack Obama consigned to history the worst excesses of the Bush Administration’s “war on terror.” One of the four executive orders Obama signed effectively cancelled seven years of controversial Justice Department legal opinions authorizing methods of treating terror suspects so brutal that even a top Bush Administration official overseeing prosecutions in Guantanamo, Susan Crawford, recently admitted they amounted to torture. According to some of those opinions, many of which remain classified, President Bush could authorize U.S. officials to capture, interrogate, and indefinitely imprison terror suspects all around the globe, outside of any legal process.
The Obama Administration’s reforms may have seemed as simple as the stroke of a pen. But on Friday afternoon, the new White House Counsel, Greg Craig, acknowledged that the reversal had been gestating for more than a year. Moreover, Craig noted in his first White House interview that the reforms were not finished yet and that Obama had deliberately postponed several of the hardest legal questions. Craig said that, as he talked with the president before the signing ceremony, Obama was “very clear in his own mind about what he wanted to accomplish, and what he wanted to leave open for further consultation with experts.”
The steps already taken amount to a stunning political turnaround. One of the executive orders places all terror suspects held abroad unambiguously under the protection of the Geneva Conventions, which outlaw any cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.. Obama also unilaterally closed the C.I.A.’s “black sites,” and set a one-year deadline for closing the military prison camp in Guantanamo. He decreed that, from now on, the International Committee for the Red Cross must have access to all detainees in U.S. custody; the Bush Administration barred the Red Cross from seeing prisoners held by the C.I.A. …
