Obama must face up to CIA's murky past

OPINION:FORMER US vice-president Dick Cheney's assertion that policies pursued by President Barack Obama since assuming office in January had made the US more vulnerable to terrorist attack than under president Bush have a context to which attention should be drawn.

Cheney’s comments are grist to the mill of neo-conservatives who have yet to come to terms with their rejection by the electorate.

Last week, the neo-con undead were rampant on Fox News, spitting hatred at Obama, denouncing his trip to Europe and portraying the president as humiliating the US. Bill O'Reilly (on The O'Reilly Factor) and Seán Hannity ( Hannity and Combs) exhibited a loathing of Islam, and by extension of Obama.

One can only hope – pray? – that most Americans do not agree with them. But if you keep portraying your president as, in effect, a traitor, a worry persists that someone will do something to, as they see it, save the country.

Fox remains the TV broadcast news medium of choice for a vast number of Americans. Fox’s forte is not to play the man or his policies analytically, but to play to base prejudices of its audience.

But back to that context.

There is a battle taking place within the Obama administration, and between elements of the administration and Bush regime associates. This was prompted by a Freedom of Information action by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has asked a Federal District Court judge in Manhattan to direct the US government to publish three internal White House memos, written in 2005 by Steven Bradbury – a justice department lawyer assigned to its Office of Legal Counsel (to the president).

The effect of publication may prove sensational, because the Bradbury memos sought to give legal justification to certain methods of interrogation and treatment of so-called “war on terror” suspects held by the CIA, many of them in Guantánamo.

The memos, it is suspected, are a quasi-legal cover for the US government in ducking its lawful obligations relating to crimes against humanity, torture and the Geneva Conventions, detailing what brutality it was legal, allegedly, for the CIA to inflict.

The downstream effect of the memos was laid bare last week with the publication of a February 2007 Red Cross report, to the US government, of what it reported had happened to 14 detainees held in Guantánamo in 2006.

The report details credible claims that the CIA, including doctors who appear to have taken a leaf from Dr Mengele, engaged in sustained beating of detainees to get information on al-Qaeda. It is incredible that with everything known about the quality of information so given, the most powerful country on Earth would lower itself by debasing its most admired values of justice.

Alleged participation of health personnel was, the Red Cross said, “a gross breach of medical ethics and, in some cases, amounted to participation in torture”.

Here’s the rub. Dick Cheney, more than George Bush, was the architect of the US response to 9/11. If the memos suggest a chain of responsibility linking Cheney to the torturers, we might yet see a former US vice-president indicted for war crimes.

In the Obama administration, some have been pushing for full disclosure, arguing for the need to assign responsibility where it belongs (the Bush regime). Others counsel Obama to heed the CIA, claiming further disclosures would compromise intelligence-gathering and do more harm than good.

That won’t deliver accountability over Bush’s abuses of power, so as to deter Cheney’s heirs, who have Fox News eager to let them vent spleen against Obama and argue, in effect, that values upon which America was built should not apply to its enemies.