Torture Photos
Obama also reversed a commitment he made earlier this year to release photos of US soldiers torturing and abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Obama said his decision stemmed from his personal review of the photos and his concern that their release would endanger American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the reversal came after several weeks of mounting accusations portraying him as weak on national security.
It became clear that the president had succumbed to a propaganda barrage unleashed by former Bush administration officials, their congressional allies, the right-wing news media and holdovers that retain key jobs under Obama.
His administration decided to fight an appeals court order to the Supreme Court that it originally said it would honor, while his appointees personally worked with lawmakers in Congress to pass legislation that would authorize the secretary of defense to circumvent the Freedom of Information Act and keep the photographs under wraps.
The legislation was passed in November and Obama swiftly signed it into law. By blocking the release of photographs, Obama essentially killed any meaningful chance of opening the door to an investigation of the senior Pentagon and Bush administration officials responsible for implementing the policies that directly led to the abuses captured in the images.
Obama's decision to fight to conceal the photos marked an about-face on the open-government policies that he proclaimed during his second day in office.
On January 21, President Obama signed an executive order instructing all federal agencies and departments to "adopt a presumption in favor" of Freedom of Information Act requests and promised to make the federal government more transparent.
"The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears," Obama's order said. "In responding to requests under the FOIA, executive branch agencies should act promptly and in a spirit of cooperation, recognizing that such agencies are servants of the public.
But the ACLU pointed out Thursday that it has seen a limited impact from that sweeping executive order.
"We have not seen the presumption translated into the release of more information," Jaffer said. "There are several cases [in] which we are just at a loss to understand why the information we are requesting is still being withheld." This information includes documents related to the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program and transcripts of Combatant Status Review Tribunals in which detainees "describe the abuse they suffered at the hands of their CIA interrogators."
Obama and Congress
In April, a set of legal memoranda written by Yoo and former OLC heads Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury were released. The memos authorized the CIA to implement a list of torture techniques to be used against so-called "high-value" prisoners, including beatings, waterboarding, sleep deprivation, placing insects inside a confinement box to induce fear, exposing detainees to extreme heat and cold, and shackling prisoners to the ceilings of their prison cells or in other painful "stress positions." The release prompted renewed pressure on members of Congress to investigate the Bush-era abuses.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy and his counterpart in the House, Rep. John Conyers, floated competing proposals early in the year for a 9/11-style "truth commission" and a blue-ribbon investigative panel to look into the circumstances that led the Bush administration to formulate a policy of torture.
Obama signaled that he was open to the idea of a "truth commission," but said he was concerned "about this getting so politicized that we cannot function effectively, and it hampers our ability to carry out critical national security operations."
Yet he immediately shifted his stance after Republicans pilloried him in numerous op-ed columns in major publications and on cable news programs for backtracking on early promises to "look forward" instead of backwards.
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