Before Obama even took office, he announced his belief that “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards” on torture. That set the standard for Obama’s tenure, as all avenues of accountability for Bush-era torture were curtailed. A Justice Department inquiry into interrogators who broke even the “acceptable torture” guidelines ended with no charges. Civil lawsuits from former detainees were blocked when the Obama-era Justice Department invoked the state secrets doctrine. An internal Justice Department review of the torture memo’s authors concluded they had not committed professional misconduct when they worked backwards to justify the Bush administration’s use of torture in defiance of laws against it. Even a proposal for a South African-style “truth and reconciliation” commission was rejected. All avenues for any form of accountability for torture—criminal, civil, even professional—were blocked by Obama-era officials. Even an episode in which the CIA spied on Senate staff in an effort to stonewall an inquiry that ultimately found CIA torture ineffective, and then lied about having done so, ended with little more than an apology.
Democrats responded to Haspel’s nomination in this vein. California Senator Dianne Feinstein, who railed against the CIA for attempting to stymie the Senate investigation into the agency’s torture program, and reportedly blocked a promotion for Haspel in 2013, said that Haspel had been “a good deputy director of the CIA.” Democrats are often loath to antagonize intelligence agencies, a quality their Republican colleagues do not share. Republicans once widely regarded the idea of investigating torturers as Obama’s “banana-republic notion of investigating his political rivals”; they have spent the last year demanding the investigation of Trump’s political rivals.
The Obama administration’s actions helped entrench a standard of accountability that stretches from beat cops to CIA officials, one in which breaking the law in the line of duty is unpunishable, but those suspected of a crime—particularly if black, Muslim, or undocumented—can be subjected to unspeakable cruelty whether or not they are ultimately guilty. After all, these are public servants who have committed their lives to protecting Americans. Why should they be punished for being overzealous? But this logic is entirely backward. It is precisely because they are imbued with such power and authority that accountability is necessary. The public is not served by lawlessness in those to whom it grants power over matters of life and death. The logic of the war on terror, that no act of brutality carries a cost that is too dear to pay, is one that erases all distinctions between right and wrong. By “looking forward,” Obama has allowed Trump to look backward.