Obama, Torture and the Long Game

Many on the left have been critical of President Obama's failure to aggressively pursue investigating and prosecuting the senior officials of the Bush administration for their approval of the use of torture. I think there is more to Obama's approach to this issue than meets the eye at this time. So does Andrew Sullivan of The Daily Dish.

I share Greenwald's deepening concern about Obama's concessions to the national security state. But I am not convinced there is no method to his meandering. Obama understands he is the president, which means that he understands, unlike his overwhelmed predecessor, that he is the president of all Americans.

He knows that indictment and prosecution of the war criminals at the heart of the last administration would appear to those cocooned from the reality of what happened as an assault on American unity and stability. That proper concern has to be balanced against the gravity of the crimes, the profound nature of the constitutional claims that underpinned them, and the necessity to uphold the rule of law. And so a process whereby the president hangs back a little, allows the evidence to slowly filter out, releases memos that help prove to Americans that what was done was unequivocally torture and indisputably illegal ... is not to be despised.

I think Obama knows what happened; and he knows that, in the end, America will have to face it. He will not defend it, but he will not be the prosecutor either. It's the long game he knows. And it's the long game that will bring these people to justice.

The Long Game is a favored tactic of Obama's dating back to the beginning of his political career and perhaps before to his days as a community organizer. He stays quiet, keeps his powder dry and only makes public moves at a time and place of his choosing. He allows others to make controversial statements for him (one wonders what he might be doing behind the scenes to facilitate this).

By the time he commits himself publicly, Obama's actions seem inevitable and graceful. He does this so smoothly that his opponents don't seem to realize how thoroughly they have been out-smarted and defeated until after the fact. I thought this was one of the reasons that John McCain seemed to get angrier and more self-destructive as the '08 campaign wore on.

UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald responds to Sullivan's post in Salon.

It's going to be quite some time before one can definitively prove or disprove that theory, but if, on Thursday, Obama does anything other than release the three OLC torture memos more or less in fully unredacted form, that will be rather compelling evidence negating Sullivan's speculation. Conversely, as I said earlier this week, if those memos are released essentially in full over the vehement objections of key intelligence officials, Obama will deserve some substantial credit for doing that.

Stay tuned.

--Ballard Burgher