Well, I agree, provided I get to decide what ‘egregious’ means. If someone else gets to decide, then I don’t know if I agree or not, because I have no idea where that bar will be set.
But I certainly would agree that the new President has the power to decide whether to bring such actions to light (we’re discussing ‘bring to light’ as opposed to any sort of criminal sanction here, of course). Whether to publicize things like that is a matter of foreign and domestic policy, and it’s the President’s job to decide what our policy should be.
Now, even the President cannot create a crime where none exists, so I don’t see any way a person can should be charged with a crime for conduct that wasn’t a crime. That goes nearly without saying.
Sorry, I don’t consider anything in post #97 an argument. The only thing of substance you mentioned is that it might lead to “accusations of witch-hunting.” Pffft. That’s gonna happen if Obama does anything to investigate anything that happened on W’s watch. Tell me why bringing such things to light (even without prosecuting them) would be a bad thing.
This I would agree with. Saying you’re going to review classified information that only a President would have access to in order to see if classification was misused to conceal criminal acts is a legitimate and focused investigation.
Now, you might say that if our CIA officers did morally questionable things, we SHOULD have disrepute brought upon the country, and that’s certainly a valid view. But – assuming we’re discussing morally questionable but legal acts – it’s also possible for a reasonable president to decide that the damage done to our reputation if these things came to light would not be worth the value gained in “coming clean.” As I said above, that’s a foreign and domestic policy decision.
Argument! Now we’re getting somewhere! But, honestly, our international reputation is already in tatters, especially WRT the behavior of our intelligence and military agencies abroad. Don’t you think owning up to all this stuff would be the first and indispensable step to repairing that reputation? Keeping it all secret and murky just invites foreigners to speculate and attribute things to us even worse than we’ve actually been doing.
Furthermore, doesn’t the internal political value of transparency outweigh any considerations of international prestige?
Okay, I see what you’re driving at now. I thought your position was that the idea of bringing up these so-called egregious actions was so noble and sacrosanct that no conservative would dare question it. Now that I see what you were getting at (provided that that is indeed what you were driving and that you’re not merely moving the goalposts, which only you would know and which I will give you the benefit of the doubt on), I’ll apologize and acknowledge that my response fell short of the mark.
Well, this sounds like Obama would be looking for crimes, which is what the Justice Department is all about. I think BG wants to go scandal-mongering.
Again, that may not be a precedent Obama wants to set. Because, sure as you’re born, the next time Obama wants to claim anything should be secret (and I suspect things will look different from inside the White House looking out than vice versa), he ain’t gonna get it.
Sure he will. W has already proven the POTUS can insist on that and make it stick in almost any particular instance. The actual effect is that Obama will have no control over what remains secret after he leaves office.
Which I based on the assumption that conservatives (i.e., those, of whom we have many here, who insist on calling themselve true conservatives as opposed to the authoritarian-statist kind) on principle place a very high premium on governmental transparency for its own sake.
Here’s the difference, as I see it. The Bush administration has apparently been classifying every damn thing, even stuff we (or at least Congress) should be aware of so they can make informed decisions. He’s the boy who cried wolf, and so it’s a natural response to call bullshit when they try to hide something “for national security.” It’s as likely to be a lie as not.
Obama, on the other hand, has pushed for transparency on several occasions, both in legislation and campaign promises. If he makes good on that in the White House, and declassifies a significant amount of information, then I’d be inclined to trust him when he says certain things do need to remain classified.
It doesn’t have to be an all or nothing deal. Just show me some integrity.
It might. It might not. Until I knew what the acts in questions actually were, I couldn’t begin to weigh the harm of disclosure against the value of transparency. Did we lie to an Al-Queda operative, perhaps convincing him that his former comrades were planning to kill him in order to get him to betray their confidence? I don’t see any reason to disclose that, and plenty of reasons not to, but someone might say that even such lies are beneath us. Did we, in a foreign land, kidnap some detainee’s six-year-old child and videotape that child’s torture, so we could show it to the detainee and tell him that we’d stop if he told us what he knew? I’d say absolutely such tactics SHOULD be exposed.
Obviously, between those extremes, there’s a great deal of ground.
Depends on what he declassifies. If he is open about his own administration, well and good. If he is open about Bush’s but then starts equivocating about his own, I would be much less likely to take him at his word.
As has been mentioned, he has no executive experience, and therefore not much experience in knowing what a leader actually needs to keep under his hat. It’s like Hilary and her health care commission, which a judge found had violated the rules by meeting in secret. (Cite.)
Argument! Now we’re getting somewhere! But, honestly, our international reputation is already in tatters, especially WRT the behavior of our intelligence and military agencies abroad. Don’t you think owning up to all this stuff would be the first and indispensable step to repairing that reputation? Keeping it all secret and murky just invites foreigners to speculate and attribute things to us even worse than we’ve actually been doing.