If Obama cedes ground on torture to Cheney, we'll all pay a heavy price

[CHIMO]

'Every government ­assumes deeds and ­misdeeds of the past," writes Hannah Arendt in Eichmann and the Holocaust. "It means hardly more, generally speaking, than that every generation, by virtue of being born into a historical continuum, is burdened by the sins of the fathers as it is blessed with the deeds of the ancestors."

For Barack Obama this cuts both ways. Talented as he is, he looks much more so when compared with the man who preceded him. Just by showing up and stringing a few coherent sentences together, he embodies an improvement. To earn acclaim in these early months, he hasn't had to do anything good. He merely had to announce that he would stop doing things that were bad.

On the other hand, he has inherited the scarred landscape of his predecessor's tenure. Bush's wars, banks, car companies, secret prisons and untried prisoners are now his. As the candidate he may have promised change, but as the president he must also simulate some sense of continuity. Soaring ­rhetoric, however hopeful about the future, cannot erase the past, which has a habit of remaining with us.

Herein lies the tension in Obama's deeply flawed attempts to come to terms with America's recent disgraceful record of torture and detainment. As a candidate he was consistent on two points. First, he was opposed to torture and would close Guantánamo Bay. "I believe that we must reject torture ­without equivocation because it does not make us safe, it results in unreliable intelligence, it puts our troops at risk, and it contradicts core American ­values." Second, he had no desire to prosecute those who have been guilty of human rights abuses. "I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of the Republicans as a partisan witch-hunt, because I think we've got too many problems to solve."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/24/obama-torture-cheney