Despite Obama's reluctance to confront possible misconduct in the Bush administration's war on terror, the outrage just won't go away.Whenever he's asked about the scandals of America's war on terror -- the torture, the wrongful detentions, the legal corners cut -- President Obama has responded with some version of this statement: "We have to focus on getting things right in the future as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past."
But that approach can't work. The unanswered questions are too many, the lawsuits too numerous, the fundamental questions of accountability too nagging. We need a public reckoning -- and, much as they might like to avoid the distraction, Obama and his people must know it.
The latest controversy was the disclosure last week that the CIA had launched a program to track down and kill Al Qaeda leaders without informing Congress. The CIA withheld the information, according to Director Leon Panetta, on orders from then-Vice President Dick Cheney. Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee were outraged: The controversy served to bolster Speaker Nancy Pelosi's contention that the CIA had chronically lied to Congress.
The dust-up over what Congress wasn't told came just as Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. announced that he will take a new look at old cases in which CIA personnel were accused of abusing detainees, to see if any of them merit prosecution. Obama has said that CIA officers who used "enhanced interrogation techniques" will not be punished if they followed regulations in force at the time. But he has also said that those who employed torture beyond the rules should answer to the law.
And such cases do exist. The CIA's inspector general reportedly sent as many as a dozen "crimes reports" on detainee abuse to the Bush administration Justice Department. Several of the cases concerned detainees who died in custody.
Bush Justice Department lawyers examined every case, officials said, but decided to prosecute only one, a contract interrogator from North Carolina named David Passaro who beat an Afghan detainee to death with a flashlight in 2003. Passaro was convicted of assault and sentenced to eight years in prison.
When Holder reviewed the inspector general's 2004 report on the detainee program, he was taken aback by the cases that weren't prosecuted. And he wasn't the first. When the tough report was delivered five years ago, it caused then-CIA Director George Tenet to suspend the program until new rules could be devised. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who also read the report, said it was "chilling."
Holder told Newsweek that he is leaning toward launching a criminal investigation into the old cases, and his words sent a shock wave through the CIA's clandestine service, which had hoped it was out of the woods. (A former official who spoke to me asked for his identity to be concealed because he expects to be questioned if the cases are reopened).
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There are two ways to resolve these nagging problems. One is the long and bumpy process of responding passively, letting Congress and the courts do what they will. That's the path Obama has taken until now. Far better, though, for the president to grasp the nettle, deal with problems quickly and put safeguards in place to prevent their recurrence. Only then can he focus fully on "getting things right in the future."
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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-mcmanus19-2009jul19,0,1823574.column
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