Striding with his usual confidant gait across the high cut lush green lawn of the Whitehouse, pausing briefly before the portable Presidential podium before embarking on Chopper One, the President made a brief statement that sent his left wing supporters into paroxysms of recriminations.
The President explained that he was withholding the photos for which the ACLU had won a court release because they would inflame anti-American sentiment and endanger American troops. Both the Secretary of defense and General Petraeus and others in the military command advised against releasing the photos particularly since twenty thousand additional troops are about to be deployed to Afghanistan.
Another factor in the equation is the President of the United States is about to make a historic, unprecedented, we-want-to-be-your-friend, speech in a Muslim country. The release of pictures torturing Muslims right before the historic sales pitch doesn’t seem like the most propitious dog-and-pony-show as a prologue to the event.
Those two considerations were dismissed by a number of those on the left and in the Blogesphere attributing his motives to withhold the torture photos to pressure from the right.
Jason Leopold of the Consortiumnews.com wrote an article picked up by other left wing websites. It was headlined; The Right Bullied Obama on Photos. The lead paragraph said.
“In reversing an earlier commitment to release photos of U.S. soldiers abusing prisoners, President Barack Obama succumbed to a propaganda barrage unleashed by former Bush administration officials, their congressional allies, the right-wing news media and holdovers, who retain key jobs under Obama.”
The ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer Director of the National Security Project said “This is profoundly inconsistent with the promises of transparency that President Obama had made over and over and over. There’s no legal basis for withholding the photographs, so this must be a political decision.”
Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., said the reversal was tantamount to “keeping the American people in the dark for no other reason than to shield misconduct, avoid embarrassment or other reasons not pertaining to national security.”
Joan Walsh of Salon wrote  the following: “Juan Cole laid out a lot of what concerns me here -- and that was before the president's appalling decision to reverse course and block the release of more torture photos to the ACLU. Obama sounded positively Rumsfeldian in his insistence that releasing the photos could hurt the troops -- that's exactly what Rumsfeld's Pentagon said when Salon ran the last archive of shocking Abu Ghraib photos in 2006, and to my knowledge, there was no backlash against American soldiers. (Trust me, if there had been one, I'd have known; MSNBC's Tucker Carlson preemptively told me I had blood on my hands.)”
What these people are demonstrating is that they can be just as disingenuously hyperbolic on their fixations as the right. Some Generals have claimed that violence against US troops spiked 200% with the release of the original Abu Ghraib torture photos. But there is a larger point to be made. The same people that have no problem understanding the incendiary nature of Abu Ghraib, the invasion of Iraq, and Guantanamo in generating an ever expanding recruitment base for those who would want to do us harm, go dumb when the argument is made that releasing these photos will inflame that same element.
This is a classic case of certain of those on the left trying to have it both ways. Joan Walsh is generally spot-on in her observation. In this case, it appears that ideology superseded objectivity and practicality. “Rumsfeldian” on its face does not disqualify a valid point. Rumsfeld pointed out that the Abu Ghraib photos endangered the troops. He was right just as sending the troops to Iraq and Afghanistan put them in harms way. Those are both undeniable realities.
For those who had been counting on the President to disassociate himself from the deviousness and hypocrisy of the former administration, that idea took a direct blow with this recent announcement.. The Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld like duplicity was contained in a couple of statements President Obama made in his photo-withholding-announcement.
“Understand these photos are associated with closed investigations of the alleged abuse of detainees in our ongoing war effort. In other words this is not a situation in which the Pentagon has concealed or sought to justify inappropriate action but rather it has gone through the appropriate and regular processes and the individuals who were involved have been identified and appropriate action has been taken.”
“It’s therefore my belief that the publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals.”
Where we take issue with President Obama was in his claiming that the small group of offenders had been identified and punished. This flies in the face of recent revelations that the torture tactics used by those enlisted men and women at Abu Ghraib were ordered by their superiors and private contractors. These people were sacrificial scapegoats. It’s an injustice twice over because their counterparts in the CIA have been declared by President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder as exempt from punishment or recrimination for following orders.
During the campaign the President warned that there would be some decisions he would make with which many of his supporters would disagree, hardly a particularly prescient prediction considering the countless decisions confronting any President. However, it’s one thing to have an honest disagreement with a decision it’s yet another to raise questions about his dishonesty.
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