Written by John Turner   

On and Off the Mark
January 6, 2011
The Big Presidential Question

On February 2, 2009, Milton Wiltmellow (at least that’s his internet name) a Salon Premium Member, wrote:

The Bush regime has spent at least the last eight years (probably the last 33 years) installing loyalists, thugs and lickspittles in key positions. Do you seriously think Obama (assuming he's on the up and up) can reverse this with soaring rhetoric and and a few indictments? The question isn't "if" it should be done. The question is "how".

Mr. Wiltmellow’s query underlies the most pressing question I have about the current American presidency: how much does Mr. Obama know about the activities of American security forces?

Is he simply kept unaware of the details? Does he know and approve? Does he know and disapprove but feel that he can’t do much about them under the present political conditions?

I confess I have no answer for those questions, nor am I aware of any way to find them. The mainstream media certainly never put them to the president. I understand he probably wouldn’t answer but it would be interesting to watch while he tried to respond.

Almost every day in the news I read stories which intensify my curiosity about what the president knows, and who he is. The latest is Mark Mazzetti’s report in the New York Times about an American boy, a citizen, whose parents are from Somalia, who was seized and tortured by Kuwaiti authorities, and who now has been placed on a no fly list so that he can’t return home to the United States. No one has told him why all this happened to him. He has not been charged with anything. But he remains in a Kuwaiti deportation detention center.

We can speculate, of course. He was traveling to visit relatives in the Gulf states, prior to beginning college at home. It’s the sort of thing many teenagers do just after they finish high school. But Gulet Mohamed’s problem seems to be that his relatives live in countries inhabited by some people who are hostile to the U.S. government. That’s the sort of movement which draws the attention of security officials. Does mere suspicion about his itinerary justify what was done to him and what continues to be done? More important, does Barack Obama think that what was done to him, evidently with the collusion of U.S. authorities, is okay?

I need to know that about the president before I can decide confidently whether to vote for him. But it’s something he won’t let me know. If I have to vote not knowing the answers to any of these questions, in the fall of 2012, then to call my vote a democratic act is a travesty. It will be a mockery of democracy (to use a bothersome alliteration).

Of all the mysteries about the American people, which are so numerous that if I tried to list them all it might take the rest of my life, near the top is the people’s sappy acceptance of the proposition that much of what the government does should be kept secret for their own good. I wish someone would tell me -- the president, a senator, a member of the Justice Department, anybody -- what good it does me not to know where the president stands on the torture and the continuing mistreatment of one of my fellow citizens?

I’ve wracked my brain trying to think of an explanation that would stand to reason, and I can’t find one. I don’t have much trouble imagining the sort of blather a secrecy monger might put out. But that would be of no help to me.

I am pushed back to Mr. Wiltmellow’s assumption (can that really be his name?), that President Obama is “on the up and up.” I don’t even know what that means anymore.

I do know this, though. If our government is based on the notion that it’s all right to participate in the torture of a teenager, and then through extra judicial means -- the secret non-fly list -- effectively to bar him from his own country, I feel a shrinking alliance to such a government. I realize that any national government is a multifaceted conglomerate with some useful and some destructive elements. But when the destructive elements reach the stage that I can’t be sure whether they control the presidency, I get very troubled.