Obama Splashes Cold Water on Campaign Promises

He told George Stephanopoulos today that his economic stimulus plan is going to be a “grand bargain” that “will require sacrifice from every American” and also said that he is not going to be able to do everything he promised to do during the campaign — at least not right away.

As well, Stephanopoulos asked Obama about his plans to shut down Gitmo. He responded that it will not happen in his first 100 days in office:

“I think it’s going to take some time and our legal teams are working in consultation with our national security apparatus as we speak to help design exactly what we need to do,” Obama said in an exclusive “This Week” interview with George Stephanopoulos, his first since arriving in Washington.

“It is more difficult than I think a lot of people realize,” the president-elect explained. “Part of the challenge that you have is that you have a bunch of folks that have been detained, many of whom may be very dangerous who have not been put on trial or have not gone through some adjudication. And some of the evidence against them may be tainted even though it’s true. And so how to balance creating a process that adheres to rule of law, habeas corpus, basic principles of Anglo-American legal system, by doing it in a way that doesn’t result in releasing people who are intent on blowing us up.”

Same story with criminal prosecutions for war crimes (emphasis in original):

The top question on Change.gov’s “Open for Questions” feature last week asked whether President-elect Obama will appoint a special prosecutor to “independently investigate” the “greatest crimes” committed under Bush. The inquiry, submitted by Bob Fertik of Democrats.com, has received over 22,000 votes. Today, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked Fertik’s question to Obama:

Q: The most popular question on your own website is related to this. On change.gov it comes from Bob Ferdick of New York City and he asks, ‘Will you appoint a special prosecutor ideally Patrick Fitzgerald to independently investigate the greatest crimes of the Bush administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping.’

OBAMA:We’re still evaluating how we’re going to approach the whole issue of interrogations, detentions, and so forth. And obviously we’re going to be looking at past practices and I don’t believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards. … My orientation is going to be moving foward.

Obama explained that he doesn’t want CIA employees to “suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering.” He did not specifically rule out a special prosecutor, saying, “That doesn’t mean that if somebody has blatantly broken the law, that they are above the law.”

According to Obama, Eric Holder is going to determine whether there have been blatant violations of the law:

Specifically, Obama explained, “When it comes to my attorney general he is the people’s lawyer… His job is to uphold the Constitution and look after the interests of the American people, not to be swayed by my day-to-day politics. So, ultimately, he’s going to be making some calls, but my general belief is that when it comes to national security, what we have to focus on is getting things right in the future, as opposed looking at what we got wrong in the past.”

Holder has some blemishes in his record but he does have a public record of opposing the Bush administration’s assault on the Bill of Rights and its abrogation of the Geneva Conventions and other long-standing legal protocols for the treatment of detainees in wartime:

The bulk of what I’ve read about and from Holder suggests, with a couple of ultimately marginal exceptions, that this appointment would be a very positive step.  Digby yesterday quoted at length from an impassioned speech Holder gave in June of this year in which he condemned Guantanamo as an “international embarrassment”; charged that “for the last 6 years the position of leader of the Free World has been largely vacant”; complained that “we authorized torture and we let fear take precedence over the rule of law“; and called for an absolute end both to rendition and warrantless eavesdropping.  He proclaimed that ”the next president must move immediately to reclaim America’s standing in the world as a nation that cherishes and protects individual freedom and basic human rights.”

What’s notable about this speech, in my view, is that the points he’s making go well beyond standard Democratic Party boilerplate on these issues.  More revealingly, the rhetoric he used is rather unconstrained for Washington, suggestive of actual passion and conviction on these matters.  As Hilzoy put it, the speech is notable “not just for the position he takes, but for his forthrightness and lack of equivocation.”

Dawn Johnsen — Obama’s pick to head the Office of Legal Counsel — is even more strongly and consistently opposed to Bush’s torture program and she has specifically criticized the idea of forgiving” and “moving on” that Obama seems to favor.

Dahlia Lithwick has an op-ed in the New York Times today on the absolute necessity of holding Bush administration officials who authorized torture accountable for  their crimes:

INSTEAD of looking closely at what high-level officeholders in the Bush administration have done over the past eight years, and recognizing what we have tacitly permitted, we would rather turn our faces forward toward a better future, promising that 2009 and the inauguration of Barack Obama will mean ringing out Guantánamo Bay and ringing in due process; it will bring the end of waterboarding and the reinstatement of the Geneva Conventions.

Indeed, the almost universal response to the recent bipartisan report issued by the Senate Armed Services Committee — finding former Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and other high-ranking officials directly responsible for detainee abuse that clearly rose to the level of torture — has been a collective agreement that no one need be punished so long as we solemnly vow that such atrocities never happen again.

[...]

Nobody is looking for a series of public floggings. The blueprints for government accountability look nothing like witch hunts. They look like legal processes that have served us for centuries. And, as the Armed Services Committee report makes clear, we already know an enormous amount about what happened to take us down the road to torture and eavesdropping. The military has commissioned at least three investigative reports about the descent into abusive interrogation. Michael Ratner, the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, has compiled what he believes to be sufficient evidence to try senior Bush administration officials for war crimes. More previously secret memos from the Office of Legal Counsel were released just last week.

[...]

It’s not a witch hunt simply because political actors are under investigation. The process of investigating and prosecuting crimes makes up the bricks and mortar of our prosecutorial system. We don’t immunize drug dealers, pickpockets or car thieves because holding them to account is uncomfortable, difficult or divisive. We don’t protest that “it’s all behind us now” when a bank robber is brought to trial.

And America tends to survive the ugliness of public reckonings, from Nixon to Whitewater to the impeachment hearings, because for all our cheerful optimism, Americans fundamentally understand that nobody should be above the law. As the chief prosecutor for the United States at the Nuremberg trials, Robert Jackson, warned: “Law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power.”

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