Senate Democrats’ new report on the CIA’s secret detention and enhanced interrogation program outlines several highly disturbing allegations — both about the nature of the harsh techniques used by U.S. officials and the agency misleading both Congress and the White House.
To the extent that national security permits, voters have a right to know what is being done in their name, especially if it is improper. That’s part of government transparency. But there seems to be incongruity and even political opportunism in President Obama’s selective commitment to disclosing the inner workings of the federal government to its employer, the public.
Obama publicly backed the release of this report, which the world will likely misinterpret as an official inquiry rather than the partisan inquiry by Democratic Senate staff that it is, despite fears that its contents could endanger U.S. personnel. An even bigger long-term concern is that the report reveals enough information to identify and confirm which nations hosted secret U.S. prisons. This could well cause harm to come to U.S. allies and discourage future cooperation on sensitive matters.
In this case, transparency overrode even those concerns. But this is seldom the case with Obama when the secrets involved are less favorable to his image.
The Obama administration has prosecuted an unprecedented number of people involved in leaking information that is arguably less harmful. His Justice Department has gone so far as to track the location and tap the personal phones of journalists. And if harsh interrogations of terrorists must be laid bare to restore U.S. moral authority, then why not, for example, the revelations from Edward Snowden that the U.S. was spying on dozens of allied foreign heads of state?
It goes without saying that Obama has less regard for transparency in his own domestic governance, which affects citizens much more directly. He cut a secret deal with the pharmaceutical lobby to support Obamacare; his administration resisted releasing accurate information about enrollments in that program for months; his agencies routinely try to avoid honoring Freedom of Information requests, to the point that they have to be sued to divulge non-life-threatening information; top officials in his administration have been caught conducting business on secret, private email accounts to conceal their doings; his IRS is balking about releasing emails that will shed light on its violations of citizens’ rights between 2010 and 2012.
Even with respect to this “torture report,” Obama still seems to be keeping to himself his belief as to whether “enhanced interrogation techniques” made possible the mission that killed Osama bin Laden — the one over which he took so many victory laps during his re-election campaign. The CIA has long maintained that the intelligence for that came from harsh interrogations. But White House spokesman Josh Earnest, asked about the connection on Monday, gave a coy and non-committal answer: “[T]he president believes that regardless of what the answer to that question is, that the use of these techniques was not worth it because of the harm that was done to our national values and the sense of what it is that we believe in as Americans.”
Transparency, it appears, overrides a multitude of serious and legitimate concerns but it doesn’t override Obama’s political calculus.
