Daniel Ellsberg, renowned whistleblower of the Vietnam war, summarizes Bradley Manning’s detention conditions here: http://t.co/apzMzAl. When asked about the treatment by members of the military at a press conference on Friday, Obama replied:
”I have asked the Pentagon whether or not the the procedures that have been taken in terms of his condition are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards. They assure me that they are. I can’t go into details about some of their concerns, but some of this has to do with Private Manning’s safety as well,”
Or, to paraphrase:
“Thousands of people and respected international human rights organizations have pointed to wrongdoing within a branch of my administration. Well, I asked the people who are accused of performing the wrongdoing and they said they weren’t doing anything wrong, so everything is OK.”
This incident paints a sad picture of the Obama administration, as I can draw only two possible conclusions from this incident:
1. Obama has lost control of his administration, or at least of the military.
2. Obama or someone surrounding him is directing the military to treat Manning is this reprehensible way.
The second conclusion would not be surprising. His presidency has not been one of transparency, reining in executive power, or the rule of law. Rather it been one of extending the Bush (and previous recent president’s) expanded executive power justified on the basis of national security and shielding executive actions from criticism by the use of way more secrecy than is healthy. In fact, as a democrat he finds it much easier to defend such actions than did George W Bush. A good portion of the left is only concerned with pointing such faults when they are perpetrated by the right, but could care less if they are carried out by a democrat. More telling is the response to department of justice spokesman P.J. Crowley’s statement of the obvious (that Manning’s torture is “ridiculous and stupid”). Crowley was promptly sacked for not echoing the official smokescreen. Manning has forcefully accomplished what Obama promised to do on his campaign, but subsequently refused to do: increase government transparency. Now he is being punished with borderline torture in order to break him mentally.
The first conclusion seems more surprising when you consider Obama’s relationship to the military. After claiming to be against the invasion of Iraq in 2003, candidate Obama promised to escalate the Afghanistan war. He did this in order to pacify the military and their cheerleading war hawks, and to appear strong on defense. It was a campaign tactic — and shows that he and his strategists knew at an early stage that they couldn’t appear to scale back the military or to control the it too much. Promising to rekindle the Afghanistan war was a calculated decision made to neutralize a possible electoral opponent. Clinton engaged in similar displays of useless military force in order to silence would-be critics who would otherwise be accusing him of being weak on defense. These liberal displays of power are always tragic for soldiers and for civilians of Asia or the Middle East.
But that was campaign time, now Obama is theoretically the commander-in-chief of the military. Obama’s lack of leverage over the military would show that maintaining or increasing useless military aggression is simply a necessary requirement for gaining the presidency, but is not sufficient to exercise meaningful control over the military. It would be worrisome, but perhaps not astonishing to find that the largest military on the planet (by a factor of 10) is not something that can be controlled, even by its commander.
