Obama's Scorecard on Torture

Last week, I heard Seymour Hersh speak at the New School’s Limiting Knowledge in a Democracy conference in New York City.

Hersh is the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who broke the story of the My Lai massacre during Vietnam, and has since gone on to expose many horrors perpetrated by the U.S. military.

How much has changed since Obama took office in terms of how we wage war? How far have we come from Bush’s policies of permitting torture and doing an end-run around the Constitution in our crusade on terror?

Here’s Obama’s scorecard on military abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“Torture –- still going on folks,” Hersh remarked. “The rule in the field is that when you get a suspect, you have 72 hours to make a determination before you turn them over to the authorities … And those 72 hours are holy hell.”

While Obama has condemned and called for an end to military abuse that’s already been reported (no more bragging about waterboarding), the tone among the higher echelons of the military and CIA remains unchanged. One year into his presidency, Obama has not been willing to stand up to generals calling the shots.

Recently, Obama backed away from promises to pull combat forces from Iraq by August, deferring to those who advocate a longer stay. “Under Gates, we have the largest defense budget in history. He’s sort of operating unfettered,” Hersh offered as further evidence that we are better at escalating wars than ending them.

“Rendition -– it’s still going on,” Hersh remarked. “There are still some secret prisons that after 8 or 9 years, no one’s caught on to.” Most disturbing, interrogations by “secret opp” forces, which allow U.S. agents to fly under the radar and break the rules of war, remain commonplace. It’s time we reign in this major loophole in respecting international humanitarian law.

Fielding questions from the crowd, Hersh, who has impressive access to military sources, painted a grim picture of assassinations regularly being carried out by the U.S. military, often based on bad intelligence.

Even now, as the trial of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed moves forward, no one wants to talk about the “183 waterboardings and worse” that Mohammed endured, or how we will deal with information obtained illegally in terrorism cases. “I don’t know if we have the stomach as a society to get to it,” Hersh said.

Slightly more optimistic, Morton Halperin from the Open Society Institute, who moderated the event, offered some advice. “You have to learn to read what the government says very carefully. Obama said they closed the secret CIA prisons. The assumption was only the CIA had secrets prisons. That wasn’t the case.”

In other words, we can’t expect we have the full story. We have to demand it, and keep the heat on Obama to restore decency and the rule of law to military operations, as he promised before taking office. He’ll keep answering to the generals until he has to answer to us.

Photo credit: The White House