Obama Whitewashes U.S. History at National Archives

Barack Obama’s speech at the National Archives left me with my usual feelings of ambivalence toward him.

I appreciated his on-target criticism of the Bush Administration for trimming “facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions” and for setting our “principles aside as luxuries that we could no longer afford.”

I applauded his observation that the Bush Administration created a “season of fear,” and in that season, “too many of us—Democrats and Republicans, politicians, journalists, and citizens—fell silent.”

I admired his clear and total repudiation of torture once again. “I categorically reject the assertion that these are the most effective means of interrogation,” he said. “What’s more, they undermine the rule of law. They alienate us in the world. They serve as a recruitment tool for terrorists.”

His clarion denunciation of “brutal methods like waterboarding” may end up being his most noble accomplishment in office.

I’m skeptical, though, that he’s right when he says, “I ended them once and for all.”

Skeptical, because ace investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill has revealed that the U.S. military is still engaged in brutal methods down in Guantanamo.

Skeptical, because Obama may, as other Presidents have, find it convenient at some point to give a wink and nod toward torture while preserving plausible deniability.

Skeptical, because even if he doesn’t, there’s no guarantee that future Presidents won’t.

Skeptical, because even as he said the United States was coming clean, he was peroxiding U.S. history. “From Europe to the Pacific,” he said, “we’ve been the nation that has shut down torture chambers and replaced tyranny with the rule of law.”

Oh, really now?

That’s a hard claim to sell in Iran, after the United States overthrew the democratically elected government of Mossadegh in 1953 and brought in the Shah and his secret police, Savak, and their reign of torture.

That’s a hard claim to sell in Guatemala, when in 1954, the United States overthrew the democratically elected Arbenz government and ushered in four decades of torture and near genocide.

That’s a hard claim to sell in Indonesia, when in 1965 the United States helped overthrow the government of Sukarno and install Suharto, whose regime killed upwards of 500,000 people in Indonesia, with the CIA furnishing the generals with names of people to assassinate.

That’s a hard claim to sell in Chile, when 1973 the United States backed the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Allende and hailed General Pinochet, who killed and tortured thousands.

That’s a hard claim to make in El Salvador, when from the days of JFK to Ronald Reagan, the CIA organized, funded, armed, and trained death squad operators who tortured and killed tens of thousands of people.

That’s a hard claim to make in Argentina, Brazil, Haiti, Paraguay, the Philippines, Uruguay, and Vietnam—just some of the other places where the CIA plied its brutal torture trade.

There’s no reason why the commander-in-chief must be the whitewasher-in-chief. Erasing the historical role of the U.S. in torture prevents us from seeing the Bush-Cheney abuses in their proper context, which is less of an aberration and more of a continuation of U.S. imperial rule.

Empire leads to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Just as empire led to the tiger cages in Vietnam, and the soccer stadium in Santiago, and the ditches dumped with mutilated bodies in El Salvador.

Obama may disown torture, but we haven’t seen the last of it, at the hands of Americans, until we give up being an empire.

On the substance of his speech, Obama, after affirming our constitutional system, tried to carve out an extra-constitutional arrangement for indefinite detention of some detainees without trial.

The Supreme Court has already ruled that a President can’t do that, and while Obama said “prolonged detention should not be the decision of any one man” and that he would get “judicial and Congressional oversight,” we should be clear: He is chiseling away at the basic habeas corpus right that has been the foundation of our jurisprudence dating back to the Magna Carta of 1215.

Obama’s preventive detention scheme “only serves to move Guantanamo to a new location and give it a new name,” said Michel Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has done more than any other organization to uphold the rights of Guantanamo detainees. http://ccrjustice.org/newsroom/press-releases/ccr-guantánamo-attorneys-comment-after-president’s-speech

“The new president is looking a lot like the old,” said Shayana Kadidal, the managing attorney for the center’s Guantanamo project. “Preventive detention goes against every principle our nation was founded on.”

Like Ratner and Kadidal, I get more than a little nervous when Obama talks about developing a new “legal regime,” one that makes it “easier for future Presidents to keep us safe.”

I like the old legal regime, the one in the Constitution.

The President already has way too much power, and it’s power not just to keep us safe but power to trample on our rights.