What Did Obama Really Say During the Campaign?

A bunch of readers have written to me since I posted this little item questioning whether New York Times editorial page editor Andy Rosenthal got it wrong when he wrote that:

When President Obama came into office in 2009 he promised to shut down the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and end the extra-judicial system that his predecessor had created to imprison terrorist suspects without trial, often without even filing charges. He has broken that promise (emphasis added).

Some readers pointed out that Rosenthal must be ignorant of the President's speech at the National Archives in May 2009, in which Obama explicitly discussed long-term detention as a possible component of a Guantanamo closure. I am inclined to defend Rosenthal on this point. That speech, about which I have written extensively, took place months after Obama took office, and Rosenthal might reasonably see it as the first major statement in which the President backed off his commitments. Others have pointed me to various statements that Obama made that may be said to justify or falsify Rosenthal's contention. Only one, in my view, even comes close to justifying Rosenthal's claim that Obama came into office having promised to forswear non-criminal detention. There may be others. As I said in my original post, I have not gone through every statement Obama made. So far, however, this is the only one I have seen that helps Rosenthal even a little. And for reasons I will explain, it doesn't help him much. In the summer of 2007, Foreign Affairs magazine ran a lengthy statement by Obama (July/August 2007, Vol. 86 Issue 4, p. 2-16) entitled "Renewing American Leadership." The essay was part of a series of pieces by the presidential candidates outlining their foreign policy views. The text is more than 5,000 words long, and buried near the bottom is the following:

To build a better, freer world, we must first behave in ways that reflect the decency and aspirations of the American people. This means ending the practices of shipping away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries, of detaining thousands without charge or trial, of maintaining a network of secret prisons to jail people beyond the reach of the law (emphasis added)

I suppose that these seven italicized words might be construed as constituting a promise to end all non-criminal detention. They do, after all, seem to say that we should end the practice of detaining people without charge or trial. So let's give Rosenthal his due. If his only contact with Obama's candidacy on these issues over the 18 months between the time this article came out and the time Obama took office were this single article, and he read a great deal into these seven words, perhaps we can understand his sense of a promise broken in that vein. Alas, to type those words is to giggle a little. For one thing, the seven words are more suggestive than conclusive. If we take them as a campaign promise, what precisely is the promise? Is it okay to detain hundreds without charge or trial, as long as we don't detain thousands? Is okay to detain thousands, as long  as we don't ship them off to far-off countries for torture or maintain secret prisons beyond the reach of the law? This is not the way politicians talk when they're making firm policy commitments. So let's take a look at one of the documents where Obama made a clear policy commitment on this subject. Consider, for example this document, a position paper entitled "Barack Obama: The War We Need to Win"--which was published around the same time as the Foreign Affairs article. It contains a section (pp. 5-6) headed "Close the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center," which gives more texture concerning what Obama was and was not promising. It reads in its entirety as follows:

Guantanamo has become a recruiting tool for our enemies. The legal framework behind Guantanamo has failed completely, resulting in only one conviction. President Bush’s own Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, wants to close it. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, wants to close it. The first step to reclaiming America’s standing in the world has to be closing this facility. As president, Barack Obama will close the detention facility at Guantanamo. He will reject the Military Commissions Act, which allowed the U.S. to circumvent Geneva Conventions in the handling of detainees. He will develop a fair and thorough process based on the Uniform Code of Military Justice to distinguish between those prisoners who should be prosecuted for their crimes, those who can’t be prosecuted but who can be held in a manner consistent with the laws of war, and those who should be released or transferred to their home countries (emphasis added).

This document clearly states--during the campaign--that Obama envisioned a category of people who can't be prosecuted but whom it is lawful under the laws of war to hold anyway. To be sure, Obama never dwelled on this point. He never used any of his copious oratorical skills to defend the propriety of non-criminal detention--preferring to talk about closing Guantanamo, living our values, restoring habeas, and the like. I fault him for this. He allowed a lot of people like Rosenthal to believe that his election would mean the end of non-criminal detention. But at least in the statements I have seen, he was generally careful to avoid ever actually saying that. And his statements, in one way or another, often acknowledged that detention has a role to play. Sometimes he acknowledged this by promising to observe the Geneva Conventions (which permit and regulate detention); sometimes he did it by talking about the importance of habeas (which creates judicial supervision of detention); sometimes, as in this quoted passage, he did it explicitly and up front and in a fashion you had to want to miss in order to miss.

Obama, in this area as in so many others, has to take responsibility for generating expectations among his supporters far beyond what any president could accomplish. But I'm almost sure--and still waiting for a single statement that clearly shows otherwise--that he never promised to hold terrorist suspects in custody only pursuant to criminal process.

To put the matter as simply as I can, I don't think Obama lied on this one or broke a promise. He did what politicians do. Rosenthal is holding Obama accountable now for what he heard in Obama's words.