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Obama Finds Allies in Graham, Lieberman, and O'Reilly on Suppression of Detainee Photos

President Obama has some interesting supporters who agree with his decision to block the release additional photos of detainee abuse by U.S. forces.

Last night on The O'Reilly Factor , host Bill O'Reilly and Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) praised Obama for his commitment to keep these photos under lock and key. Graham and Lieberman are trying to push through the Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act of 2009 that would ban the release of any photo between 9/11/01 and 1/22/09 that would "endanger the troops". The Senators and O'Reilly also took the time to chide those on the "far-left" for not caring about the lives of U.S. troops because of their advocacy for the release of these photos. Watch:





If we are going to ban photos, then Glenn Greenwald questions why we don't just suppress evidence of civlian deaths in Afghanistan when they occur. After all, information that the United States kills and maims civilians could be used as a recruiting tool that would "endanger the troops" right? Greenwald:

Using the standard that is now so accepted across the political spectrum in Washington -- information that will inflame anti-American sentiment should be suppressed rather than disclosed so at to not endanger our troops -- isn't it better if we just cover-up, rather than learn the truth about, the civilian deaths we caused in Afghanistan? After all, news reports of dead Afghan women and children at the hands of American bombs obviously inflame anti-American sentiment and Endanger Our Troops at least as much as the disclosure of some additional torture photos would. By the prevailing reasoning of Washington, shouldn't we want our government to hide the truth about what we did -- lest anti-American anger and the risk of attack on Our Troops increase? Isn't that the noble anti-transparency principle we're now endorsing?

The people who are killed by the airstrikes are just as dead. Thus, there's no value in transparency for its own sake. What's the point of our knowing as citizens the truth about what happened and learning the evidence that proves it? All that would do is put our Troops in danger.

Who cares about actual accountability, let's just suppress evidence of all mistakes made by the U.S. in the name of national security and call it a day. Out of sight, out of mind.

Obama Continues to Expand on Bush-era Secrecy

With much of the country's focus on Obama's trip to Egypt, his Supreme Court nominee, and the murder of George Tiller, there is one important item that seems to be flying under the radar.

Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) have jointly sponsored a bill entitled "The Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act of 2009". This bill is aimed at suppressing any photograph between September 11, 2001 and January 22, 2009 that relates to the treatment and/or capture of detainees by U.S. Armed Forces should the Secretary of Defense certify that they would endanger U.S. troops or American citizens. The decision by the Secretary of Defense would last for three years, is renewable for an indefinite period of time, and trumps any decision under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Glenn Greenwald reacts:

Just imagine if any other country did this. Imagine if a foreign government were accused of systematically torturing and otherwise brutally abusing detainees in its custody for years, and there was ample photographic evidence proving the extent and brutality of the abuse. Further imagine that the country's judiciary -- applying decades-old transparency laws -- ruled that the government was legally required to make that evidence public. But in response, that country's President demanded that those transparency laws be retroactively changed for no reason other than to explicitly empower him to keep the photographic evidence suppressed, and a compliant Congress then immediately passed a new law empowering the President to suppress that evidence. What kind of a country passes a law that has no purpose other than to empower its leader to suppress evidence of the torture it inflicted on people? Read the language of the bill; it doesn't even hide the fact that its only objective is to empower the President to conceal evidence of war crimes.

[...]

The debate over whether there is value in disclosing these specific photographs is entirely misplaced. That isn't how open government works. The burden isn't on citizens to prove that there is value in disclosure. Everything that government does is supposed to be transparent to the public unless there is a compelling reason for secrecy -- and the whole point of FOIA always has been that mere embarrassment, the mere fact that information reflects poorly on our government, isn't a legitimate ground for concealment. That's a critical principle for open government. This new law explicitly guts that principle. It institutionalizes the pernicious notion that secrecy is justified where disclosure would reflect badly on the Government and thus "endanger" American citizens and/or our troops.

Barack Obama ran a campaign that was highly critical of the secrecy of the last eight years under the Bush Administration and promised greater transparency. This bill, which Obama supports, seeks to implement a greater level of secrecy and executive power that goes a level beyond even that of President Bush. The Senate has unanimously passed this bill but it appears that it may have trouble getting through the House.

Greenwald again:

But passage of Graham-Lieberman now appears much less certain because of what appears to be the refusal of some key liberal House Democrats -- including Barney Frank -- to support it. The votes of liberal House Democrats actually matter (for once) because most House Republicans are refusing to support the overall supplemental bill due to their objections to a provision for $5 billion in funding to increase the IMF's lending capacity. To pass the supplemental spending bill, House leaders need the votes of numerous House Democrats who are currently refusing to vote for anything that contains the photo suppression amendment. If Congressional Democrats succeed in blocking enactment of this amendment, that would be a critical assertion for the first time of Congressional checks on Obama's desired powers and would, independently, prevent a truly odious new secrecy power from being enacted.

[...]

If, as Obama claims, there are legitimate reasons to suppress these photos under FOIA's exemptions (including its very broad national security exemptions), then the Supreme Court can reverse the two lower court rulings ordering disclosure -- as Obama is asking it to do. But there is no good reason to vest the Obama administration with the unilateral power to simply waive FOIA requirements simply because it loses in court and decides it doesn't want to comply with court rulings and with current transparency laws.

FOIA was enacted by Congress in 1966 -- more than 40 years ago -- and, in 1974, Congress overrode a presidential veto of amendments that expanded its disclosure requirements in the wake of Nixonian secrecy abuses. Congress should defend and insist on presidential compliance with the important transparency law it passed and repeatedly strengthened -- not allow the White House and Republicans to jointly render it illusory by retroactively narrowing its provisions, all because the Obama White House wants to suppress evidence of Bush's war crimes in the face of clear FOIA requirements compelling disclosure.

Obama to Try and Block the Release of Photographs that Depict Abuse

It had been expected that the Obama Administration was going to comply with a court order stemming from a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and release photographs which depict abuse of detainees that were held in U.S. custody. The ACLU wanted the release of these photographs to counter the arguments of the Bush Administration that the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib was an isolated incident and not part of government policy.

Ever since the Obama Administration announced that they would comply with the court order, there has been an outcry from both lawmakers and commentators on the Right claiming that the release of these photos would make those serving in the United States military less safe. Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) even wrote a letter to President Obama in which they asked for the photographs not to be released because they would serve "no public good" and "endanger our men and women in uniform".

It is now being reported that the Obama Administration has reversed itself and that President Obama has now directly decided to oppose the release of these additional photos citing a concern for the safety of U.S. troops. Speaking to the New York Times, one anonymous administration official stated:

"The president strongly believes that the release of these photos, particularly at this time, would only serve the purpose of inflaming the theaters of war, jeopardizing US forces and making our job more difficult in places like Iraq and Afghanistan."

and another senior administration official stated:

"The president would be the last to excuse the actions depicted in these photos. That is why the Department of Defense investigated these cases, and why individuals have been punished through prison sentences, discharges, and a range of other punitive measures."

Aside from this last interesting quote (Obama is apparently in favor of prosecutions and investigations for some who carried out torture, but not for those who ordered it), the outcry over the release of these photos takes on an interesting dynamic.

On one hand you have people like Sean Hannity, Liz Cheney, Joe Lieberman, and others claiming that the release of these photos will depict American troops in a "negative light" and would cause us national harm, while on the other hand you have this same group of people actively defending the use of torture as necessary to our safety. Here is a compilation put together by ThinkProgress:



Note how in the video clip the acts in the photos are denounced by many as something that happened "in the past" and they speak of these actions as if they are obviously wrong. This does two things, first this deflects from the obvious point that the appalling act is not the release of the photos, but that these acts of torture were occurring in the first place and authorized by the last Administration. Secondly, it deflects from the aforementioned point that these same people who are so against the release of these awful photos are the exact same people who are advocating and justifying the use of torture over the last eight years.

It is situations like these which allow for Liz Cheney to state in one breath that by releasing these photos Obama is in fact "siding with the terrorists" and claim in another breath that the United States never engaged in torture and that techniques like waterboarding are vital to saving American lives.




This entry is crossposted here