The President’s Missed Opportunity
In a recent article for TruthOut.org, Russ Baker wrote an article titled, “Qaddafi, Bush and the Iraq Big Lie” in which he reminds us of the troubling ties between the US and Libya’s despotic leader, Muammar el-Quaddaffi. Baker writes:
“In May, 2009, a man named Ibn Shaikh al-Libi supposedly committed suicide while being held in a Libyan jail. Al-Libi is a deeply, deeply interesting fellow. Back in 2002, he was tortured by Egypt under US direction. It appears that the reason the US government had him tortured was not to stop some imminent attack on the United States, but to generate alleged—and false— links between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that could justify invading Iraq.”
The article goes on to cite Nick Baumann’s 2009 article for Mother Jones:
“Al-Libi was the man whose false confession, obtained under torture, of a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda provided the Bush administration with its casus belli for war with Iraq. It didn’t seem to matter that al-Libi’s claim that Bin Laden had sent operatives to be trained in the use of weapons of mass destruction by Hussein’s people didn’t make any sense. ‘They were killing me,’ al-Libi later told the FBI about his torturers. ‘I had to tell them something.’ A bipartisan Senate Intelligence committee report would later conclude that al-Libi lied about the link ‘to avoid torture.’”
This revelation about Ibn Shaikh al-Libi is just one of what has been a constant stream of skeletons falling out of the Pentagon and State Department’s closets since Egyptian police fired tear gas canisters labeled “Made in the USA” at protesters in Tahrir Square.
Of course it’s always easy to look back on a series of events and/or decisions and stand in judgment of what an elected official or a political party should or should not have done. But while hindsight may always be 20/20, the resulting criticism is not always fair nor prudent. However, sometimes the only way that individuals, and in this case a nation, can move forward is to carefully examine past mistakes, evaluate the consequences and, commit to changing course. There was never a better time for this type of examination than when President Obama was elected to office, on a wave of dissatisfaction with the policies and practices of the Bush/Cheney era, and with a mandate for change. And when in January, 2009, then House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) introduced H.R. 104, a bill to establish a National Commission on Presidential War Powers and Civil Liberties to investigate the policies that were undertaken by the Bush administration under claims of unreviewable war powers, it was the Obama administration’s opportunity to clean the the US’ foreign policy closets. The opportunity was missed. Now, 8 years of a previous administration’s embarrassing dirty laundry is spilling out, one dirty item at a time.
As a Political Voices of Women contributing editor, Marcia G. Yerman wrote in 2009:
“A litmus test for many will be the stand that the Obama administration puts forth on accountability regarding the actions of Bush and his key players on the issue of torture and civil rights. The conversation is out there, and has been featured in numerous posts including a January 9th article at Talking Points Memo by Elana Schor. Jonathan Turley, Constitutional Law Professor at George Washington University, has been seen on both the Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow shows, where he has been explaining the high stakes for all Americans in getting this right.”
As I wrote at the time, I believed that Americans and the global community deserved answers to questions about the Bush administration policies that lead to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the suspension of habeas corpus, the NSA wire-tapping program, extraordinary rendition, torture, the no-bid contracts to war contractors, and more. It was my opinion that if President Obama and the 111th Congress failed to at least public hearing on these issues that there failure to do so would come back to come not only the President, the Democratic Party but US foreign relations. My support for H.R. 104 had less to do with the criminal prosecution of Bush administration officials, than a desire to see the record straight and a framework for real change built on a solid foundation. There are still Americans who believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the attacks on 9/11 and that the Iraq war was all about the desire to spread democracy to the Middle East. This, of course, if probably the same group that believes that President Obama is a Muslim.
So now, instead of an investigation by a bi-partisan panel, the White House and State Department are busily spinning answers to questions about the US’ relationships with the regimes of Mubarak, Qaddafi and Bahrain’s royal family and, the American public is learning about our foreign policy via Wikileak’s unveliing of State Department cables and CNN’s pictures of Beyonce’s private performance for the Qaddaffi family.
Congressional hearings would have been much kinder.
