Video and Transcript: President Obama at St. Louis Town Hall Meeting (29 April)

President Obama held a 70-minute Town Hall Meeting in St. Louis this morning. The transcript is from the White House. The video, from KSDK Television (forgive the automatic upload of the advertisement), is in two parts, the first is Obama's speech and the second is the question-and-answer session:






THE PRESIDENT: Thank you so much. Thank you. Everybody please have a seat. Have a seat. Thank you so much. What a wonderful introduction. It's good to be out of Washington, good to be back in the Midwest.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: We love you!

THE PRESIDENT: Love you back. (Applause.)

Let me, first of all, ask everybody to give a huge round of applause to Linda for the great introduction and everything that she's been doing in the community. Thank you so much. (Applause.)

I've got a few other friends who are here -- you may know them, I want to make sure that I acknowledge them. One of, I think, the finest members of Congress that we have and somebody who's just been a great friend of mine, she is somebody you want in the foxhole with you when you got a tough fight -- please give a huge round of applause to Claire McCaskill. (Applause.)

We've got one of the finest new governors in the country, Jay Nixon. (Applause.) Where did Jay go? There he is. An outstanding Secretary of State and somebody who I think may turn out to be pretty good in Washington if she just so decides -- Robin Carnahan. (Applause.) We've got Attorney General Chris Koster here. (Applause.) State Treasurer Clint Zweifel. (Applause.) A great friend who was with me from the start -- Susan Montee, your State Auditor. (Applause.) We have our outstanding host today, Mayor Ron Counts, of Arnold. (Applause.)

We've got Congressman Russ Carnahan, who is voting on the budget today, but I want everybody to give him a big round of applause anyway. (Applause.)

I want to thank everybody here at Fox High School for their hospitality. (Applause.) I want to thank your lovely school superintendent, who is just doing an outstanding job. Please stand up. (Applause.) I want to thank the Warriors for the basketball jersey -- (applause) -- which I will wear with pride -- yeah! (Applause.) If I ever get to play basketball again -- (laughter) -- they've been keeping me a little busy.

It is great to be back in the middle of America, where common sense often reigns. (Applause.) And this reminds me of why I like to get out of Washington now and again.

The last time I was in Missouri was just under six months ago, at a high school a lot like this one. We were in Springfield; it was two days before the election, and I was making my final case to the American people. And it was just an unbelievable crowd, bigger than anything anybody had expected. And so we're here in Missouri to -- we were here in Missouri at the end of a long journey to the White House, and so now I want to come back and speak to you at the beginning of another long journey. Today marks 100 days since I took the oath of office to be your President. (Applause.) One hundred days. It's a good thing. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause.)

Now, back in November, some folks were surprised that we showed up in Springfield at the end of our campaign. But then again, some folks were surprised that we even started our campaign in the first place. (Laughter.) They didn't give us much of a chance. They didn't think we could do things differently. They didn't know if this country was ready to move in a new direction.

But here's the thing -- my campaign wasn't born in Washington. My campaign was rooted in neighborhoods just like this one, in towns and cities all across America; rooted in folks who work hard and look after their families and seek a brighter children -- future for their children and for their communities and for their country.

It was driven by workers who were tired of seeing their jobs shipped overseas, their health care costs go up, their dreams slip out of reach. (Applause.) It was grounded in a sense of unity and common purpose with every single American, whether they voted for me on Election Day or voted for somebody else. It was energized by every citizen who believed that the size of our challenges had outgrown the smallness of our politics. My campaign was possible because the American people wanted change.

I ran for President because I wanted to carry those voices -- your voices -- with me to Washington. (Applause.) And so I just want everybody to understand: You're who I'm working for every single day in the White House. I've heard your stories; I know you sent me to Washington because you believed in the promise of a better day. And I don't want to let you down.

You believed that after an era of selfishness and greed, that we could reclaim a sense of responsibility on Wall Street and in Washington, as well as on Main Street. You believed that instead of huge inequalities and an economy that's built on a bubble, we could restore a sense of fairness to our economy and build a new foundation for lasting growth and prosperity. You believed that at a time of war, we could stand strong against our enemies and stand firmly for our ideals, and show a new face of American leadership to the world.

That's the change that you believed in. That's the trust you placed in me. It's something I will never forget, the fact that you made this possible.

So today, on my 100th day in office, I've come to report to you, the American people, that we have begun to pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off, and we've begun the work of remaking America. (Applause.) We're working to remake America.

Now, we've got a lot of work to do, because on our first day in office we found challenges of unprecedented size and scope. Our economy was in the midst of the most serious downturn since the Great Depression. Banks had stopped lending. The housing market was crippled. The deficit was at $1.3 trillion. And meanwhile, families continued to struggle with health care costs, too many of our kids couldn't get the education they needed, the nation remained trapped by our dangerous dependence on foreign oil.

Now, these challenges could not be met with half-measures. They couldn't be met with the same old formulas. They couldn't be confronted in isolation. They demanded action that was bold and sustained. They demand action that is bold and sustained. They call on us to clear away the wreckage of a painful recession, but also, at the same time, lay the building blocks for a new prosperity. And that's the work that we've begun over these first 100 days.

To jumpstart job creation and get our economy moving again, we passed the most ambitious economic recovery plan in our nation's history. And already, we're beginning to see this change take hold. In Jefferson City, over 2,500 jobs will be created on Missouri's largest wind farm, so that American workers are harnessing clean, American energy. (Applause.) Across the state, roughly 20,000 transportation jobs will be supported by the Recovery Act, so that Missourians are rebuilding your roads, your bridges, your rails.

To restore fairness to our economy, we've taken several steps with Congress to strengthen the middle class. We cut taxes for 95 percent of American households through a tax cut that will put $120 billion directly into your pockets. (Applause.) We finally signed a law long overdue that will protect equal pay for equal work for American women. (Applause.) We extended health care to millions of children across this country. (Applause.)

We launched a housing plan that has already contributed to a spike in the number of homeowners who are refinancing their mortgages, which is the equivalent of another tax cut for them. And if you haven't refinanced, you might want to take a look and see if it's possible, because that can save people a lot of money. We've taken steps to unfreeze the market for auto loans and student loans and small business loans. And we're acting with the full force of the federal government to ensure that our banks have the capital and the confidence to lend money to the families and business owners who keep this economy running.

Now, even as we cleared away the wreckage, I've also said that we can't go back to an economy that's built on a pile of sand -- on inflated home prices and maxed-out credit cards; on over-leveraged banks and outdated regulations that allowed the recklessness of just a few people to threaten the prosperity of all of us.

So that's why I introduced a budget and other measures that build on the Recovery Act to lay a new foundation for growth -- a foundation that's built on five pillars that will strengthen our economy and help us compete in the 21st century: number one, new investments in education that will equip our workers with the right skills and training; number two, new investments in renewable energy that will create millions of jobs and new industries; number three, new investments in health care that will cut costs for families and businesses; number four, new savings that will bring down our deficit; and number five, new rules for Wall Street that reward drive and innovation. (Applause.)

Now, I've got to say that some of the people in Washington have been surprised -- they said, boy, he's so ambitious; he's been trying to do so much. Now, maybe they're not accustomed to this, but there's no mystery to what we've done. The priorities that we've acted upon were the things that we said we'd do during the campaign. (Applause.) I mean, it's not like anybody should be surprised. The policies we've proposed were plans we talked about for two years, in places like this, all across the country with ordinary Americans. The changes that we've made are the changes we promised. That's what you should expect from a President. You may not always agree with me, but if you take a look at what I said I was going to do when I was running for office, and you now look at what we are in the middle of doing -- we're doing what we said we'd do. (Applause.)

Now, after 100 days, I'm pleased with the progress we've made, but I'm not satisfied. I'm confident in the future, but I'm not content with the present -- not when there are workers who are still out of jobs, families who still can't pay their bills; not when there are too many Americans who can't afford their health care, so many of our children being left behind and our nation is not leading the world in developing 21st century energy. I'm not satisfied. And I know you aren't either. The crisis that we're confronting was many years in the making; it will take us time to overcome it. We've come a long way, we can see the light on the horizon, but we've got a much longer journey ahead.

And one of the encouraging things for me is the fact that the American people know this. You know that our progress has to be measured in the results that we achieve over many months and years, not the minute-by-minute talk in the media. And you know that progress comes from hard choices and hard work, not miracles. I'm not a miracle worker. We've got a lot of tough choices and hard decisions and hard work ahead of us. The 100th day might be a good time to reflect on where we are, but it's more important to where we're going that we focus on the future, because we can't rest until our economy is growing and we've built that new foundation for our prosperity.

We can't rest until we reform those outdated rules and regulations that allowed this crisis to happen in the first place. And that's why I've called for tough, new, common-sense rules of the road that punish abuse and reward drive and innovation in the financial sector. I expect a bill to arrive on my desk for signature before this year is out. We are going to make sure this kind of crisis does not happen again. (Applause.)

We can't rest until we have schools that prepare our children for the challenges of the 21st century. And we've already made historic investments in education and college affordability. I was talking to your superintendent about all the wonderful things that she's going to be able to do with some of the money that came out of the recovery package. We're going to continue to help our schools meet high standards and close achievement gaps. And we're going to reward teachers for performance and give them new pathways for advancement. (Applause.) We are going to seek the goal of once again having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world -- we're going to do it by 2020. (Applause.)

We can't rest until we harness the renewable energy that can create millions of new jobs and new industries. The Recovery Act will double the supply of renewable energy, but the only way to truly spark an energy transformation is through a gradual, market-based cap on carbon pollution so that energy, clean energy is the profitable kind of energy. And we can do this in a way that creates jobs. That's how we can grow our economy, enhance our security, and protect our planet at the same time.

I don't think we can rest until we have a 21st century health care system that makes sense -- (applause) -- one that cuts costs for families and businesses across America. That's why we invested in preventative care, we've invested in electronic records; that's why my budget makes a down payment on reform that will finally make quality health care affordable for every American. And I look forward to working with both parties in Congress to make this reform a reality in the months to come.

And we can't rest until we restore the fiscal discipline that will keep us from leaving our children with a mountain of debt. And working with people like Claire McCaskill, we have already put forward a budget that will cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term. We've launched a procurement reform effort that will greatly reduce no-bid contracts and will save $40 billion. We're going through the budget line by line, page by page; we've already identified more than 100 programs to reduce or eliminate because they don't work. And I've personally asked the leadership in Congress to pass into law rules that follow the simple principle: You pay for what you spend -- so that government acts the same way any responsible family does. If you want a tax cut, you got to pay for it; if you want a new program, you got to pay for it. Tell the American people the truth -- how are you going to pay for it? (Applause.)

And finally, we can't rest until America is secure and our leadership is restored. And that's why I've begun to end the war in Iraq through a responsible transition to Iraqi control. It is their country, they need to take control. (Applause.) That's why we have a new strategy to disrupt and dismantle and defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That's why we've renewed our diplomacy to reduce the spread of nuclear weapons, to speak directly to our adversaries, and strengthen relations in the hemisphere.

And that's why we have rejected the false choice between our security and our ideals. That's why I ordered the closing of the detention center at Guantanamo; that's why I prohibited the use of torture -- (applause) -- because America is stronger than any enemy -- and we always have been -- precisely because we do what's right not just when it's easy, but when it's hard. That's what sets us apart.

We're living through extraordinary times. We didn't ask for all the challenges that we face, but we're determined to answer the call to meet them. That's that spirit I see everywhere I go. That's the spirit we need to sustain, because the answer to our problems will ultimately be found in the character of the American people. We need soldiers and diplomats, scientists, teachers, workers, entrepreneurs. We need your service; we need your active citizenship. That's why I recently signed a bill that will create hundreds of thousands of opportunities for the American people to serve. That's why I will continue to ask for your help and your ideas and your support to make the changes that we need.

I want to warn you, there will be setbacks. It will take time. But I promise you I will always tell you the truth about the challenges that we face and the steps that we are taking to meet them. I will continue to measure my progress by the progress that you see in your own lives. And I believe that years from now we are going to be able to look back at this time as the moment when the American people once again came together to reclaim their future. (Applause.) That's what this is about.

Thank you, everybody. Thank you. (Applause.)

All right, this is the fun part. Everybody sit back down. I'm going to take questions. There are no rules, nobody has been pre-screened. And we're not going to be able to get through all of the questions that people want to ask, so if you can raise your hand I will try to call on you. We're going to go girl-boy-girl-boy, so nobody thinks I'm biased. (Laughter.) I'll try to just go around the gym and we'll get to as many as we can. If you can stand up, introduce yourself when the question has been asked, and we should have some microphones in the audience -- right? Where are microphone people? Raise up your mics. Okay, so we've got a few here. So wait for the microphone so everybody can hear your question.

All right, this gentleman right here -- right there. Yes, you. I guess we're going boy-girl. (Laughter.) You can go ahead and hand him the mic.

Q I'm a retired auto worker from General Motors. And I was just curious, with all the -- what's going on in the news and with the contracts and everything, where is this all eventually going to leave the retirees' pensions and our health care? I mean, we also are considered middle class --

THE PRESIDENT: Keep the mic near you.

Q Oh, I'm sorry. We're also considered middle class and it seems like they keep constantly wanting to take it away from the auto worker and prosecuting us, instead of the corporate that brought us to this.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, it's a good question. Let me talk about what's happening with autos, because obviously this is a big concern for everybody. I believe that the U.S. should have a strong auto industry. I believe that. (Applause.) One of the things, one of the transitions I want to make, I want us to get back to making things, not just shuffling paper around. (Applause.) And so the auto industry is a major part of that.

Now, what is also true is that the decisions that were made over decades put the U.S. auto industry in a bad spot. We used to build the cars that consumers wanted, and at a certain point those weren't the cars that were being designed. Now, in fairness to the auto industry, a lot of the cars that are coming out of Detroit have gotten really good; they are on par with foreign imports. But the problem is, is that because of a lot of those bad decisions catching up, even though there's some very good products out there, overall the companies were in really bad shape.

Now, the Bush administration had already given several billions of dollars worth of aid, and GM and Chrysler were told to come up with a plan. When they presented the plan to us, my responsibility to taxpayers is to look at those plans in a realistic way and figure are these plans going to work in order to put these auto companies on a firm, solid footing where they can operate without government subsidies and succeed, and compete in the marketplace. Because we've got the best workers; we just need the best plans. Right? (Applause.)

Unfortunately, the plan that they presented just weren't realistic. I mean, we did a pretty thoroughgoing analysis of this thing and you couldn't -- what they were doing wasn't painting a picture of how they could be viable over the long term -- without being wards of the state. And, frankly, there's no way that we were going to get taxpayers to just, every few months, just give a few more billion dollars, because there are a lot of other industries that would love to have those kinds of subsidies.

So we are now at the point where Chrysler is supposed to report back to us in the next day or two about their plans for a potential merger with Fiat -- and the Fiat management has actually done a good job transforming their industry. We're hoping that you can get a merger where the taxpayers will put in some money to sweeten the deal, but ultimately the goal is we get out of the business of building cars, and Chrysler goes and starts creating the cars that consumers want. And one of the potential advantages of a merger is new technologies where Chrysler starts making fuel-efficient clean-energy cars that will meet the needs of the future market.

We don't know yet whether the deal is going to get done. I will tell you that the workers at Chrysler have made enormous sacrifices -- enormous sacrifices -- to try to keep the company going. One of the key questions now is, are the bond holders, the lenders, the money people, are they willing to make sacrifices, as well? We don't know yet, so there's still a series of negotiations that are taking place.

I can tell you that no matter what happens, we want to provide certain protections to retirees for their health care and their pensions. That will also be expensive for taxpayers. But my attitude is we got here not because our workers didn't do a great job trying to build a great product; it was because management decisions betrayed workers.

There are going to be some long-term adjustments that have to be made, though, both for Chrysler and GM. GM, by the way, has 30 more days, because their restructuring is more thoroughgoing than what was required with Chrysler. But I can guarantee you I will -- I look at this from the perspective of how can I create a strong, viable, competitive auto industry that is giving workers an opportunity to build a great product, take pride in that product, and continue to support their families and build communities that are strong.

That's my entire orientation, and how do I do that in a way that doesn't waste taxpayer money -- because, as I said, people in other industries would love help, as well, and I've got to be fair to people who aren't in the auto industry. If we're going to do it, it's got to be because we think that we've got a long-term plan that actually makes sense. I think we can get there, but we've still got a little more work to do. (Applause.)

`All right. Young lady up there in the pink, right there. There we go.

Q I'm a school counselor in the Fox T6 district. President Obama, what do you feel is the biggest challenge facing our educational system today, and how do you plan on meeting those challenges?

THE PRESIDENT: Okay, excellent question. I believe that we've got a multitude of challenges. So rather than just isolate on one, let me talk about several.

Our children are coming out of high school -- in some cases, they're not even graduating high school, but even if they graduate from high school -- ranked lower on math and science scores than many other advanced industrialized countries. Nations like China and India are starting to turn out more engineers, more scientists. If we aren't able to compete technologically we're not going to be able to compete, because this is a knowledge-based economy. We can have some people who are really willing to work hard, but if the technology is coming from overseas and all we're competing for is just our labor, then over time those countries will get richer, our countries will get poorer.

So we've got to upgrade across the board -- not just in poor, underprivileged schools, but across the board -- we've got to upgrade the performance levels of our young people. Now, in order to do that, the single-biggest ingredient is the quality of our teachers; single most important factor -- (applause) -- single most important factor in the classroom is the quality of the person standing at the front of the classroom. And that's why our recovery package put a lot of emphasis on teacher training, teacher recruitment, teacher retention, professional development.

And I've got a terrific young Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, who is -- (applause) -- and he is so passionate, but he's tough, and he wants to push school districts to really do what it takes to give teachers the support that they need.

Now, that involves a whole range of things. It means that how we train and recruit teachers in the first place, how do we match them up with master teachers so that they learn best practices; how do we make sure that if they're coming in and they don't have all the professional background they need in something -- a subject area like science, that we give them the training they need; and how do we recruit people who might be great teachers but didn't go through the conventional channels. If there's a chemist out there somewhere who wants to teach, we should be able to get him into the classroom in an expedited way, because he or she is bringing skills that we need.

I just gave an award to the Teacher of the Year, who was a police officer, a cop -- had gone to the -- had become a captain in the New York City Police Department and then decided that he wanted to pursue his lifelong love of learning and went back to teach -- and asked for the toughest-to-teach kids. Well, we want to encourage people like that who have a passion for teaching.

Now, I also want to increase teacher pay so that a lot more people want to go into teaching. (Applause.)

The deal I've got to strike with teachers, though -- I may not get as much applause on this -- (laughter) -- is I would like to work with teachers and the teachers unions, because I'm a union guy, but I do believe -- (applause) -- but I do believe that it's important for the unions to work flexibly with school districts in a consensual fashion to find ways so that if you've got a really excellent teacher, after 15, 20 years, they can get paid a little bit more -- right? -- if they're doing a really good job. (Applause.)

And now the flip side -- I'm telling you, I'm getting to the point where I'm not going to get applause. (Laughter.) If you've got a bad teacher who can't -- after given all the support and the training that they need is just not performing up to snuff, we've got to find that person a new job. (Applause.)

Just a couple more comments on education generally. A lot of schools still aren't using technology as well as they could in the classroom. And one of the things we're trying to do with the Recovery Act is to help schools get broadband, get computers, but then also train people to use it properly. I think we can do more with technology. Once kids get out of high school, making college affordable is absolutely critical. (Applause.) We have to redesign the college experience so that -- not everybody is going to go to school for four years right in a row when they're 18. Some people are going to work for two years, then go back to school for two years once they figure out something they're interested in; go back to work, maybe five years down the road they need to retrain.

We've got to create a pathway for lifelong learning for young people -- and not-so-young people -- so that all American workers are continually upgrading their skills. (Applause.) So we want to put a lot more emphasis on community colleges and how they are working effectively together.

Let me make a last point because I don't want to -- I could talk about this stuff forever. One last point which I always have to remind people of -- I said that the biggest ingredient in school performance is the teacher. That's the biggest ingredient within a school. But the single biggest ingredient is the parent. (Applause.) So this is an example where, people are always trying to say, oh, Obama, is he liberal? Is he conservative? Well, I want government to do what it should do, but there's some things government can't do. That's where I'm conservative. Government can't force parents to turn off the TV set and tell your kid to sit down and do their homework. I can't do that. (Applause.) That's not my job. That's your job. Well, it is my job with Sasha and Malia. (Laughter.) Those two, I'm responsible for.

But the other part of it is it's not just making sure your kids are doing their homework, it's also instilling a thirst for knowledge and excellence. It's been noted widely that there are a lot of immigrant students who come from very modest backgrounds economically that end up doing very well. And why is that? Well, the difference is, is that in their families and in their communities a lot of times they've got that attitude that used to be prevalent, but sometimes we're losing -- sometimes I worry we're losing -- and that is, boy, it is a privilege to learn, it's a privilege to discover new things, it's cool to be smart. (Applause.) We want to reward kids for doing well in school. (Applause.)

And the community can help the parents. Listen, I love basketball. But the smartest kid in the school, the National Science Award winner should be getting as much attention as the basketball star. (Applause.) That's a change that we've got to initiate in our community.

All right, gentleman in the tie there, since he wore a tie. That was really nice of him. (Laughter.) We appreciate that. Thank you.

Q I'm the junior class vice president of Fox High School. (Applause.)

THE PRESIDENT: All right.

Q I was just curious to what policies you're going to put into place in order to protect Social Security for the upcoming generations.

THE PRESIDENT: That's a good question. (Applause.) Let me, first of all -- a lot of people know this, but I always want to try to explain how Social Security works so that you have a better sense of what we have to do, going forward.

Social Security is not an individual account. When you pay your payroll tax, it doesn't go into -- I'm sorry, what was your name? Jay? It doesn't go into Jay's account. Your Social Security tax goes to pay for current retirees. And hopefully when you retire, young people who are working then, their money will go to pay for your retirement.

So it's an intergenerational commitment that we make to each other. What we say is, look, all of us are going to grow old, so we're going to make sure that there's enough money in there for your retirement; and those of us who are currently working, we pay into the kitty to make sure that that happens, and then we expect that the next generation is going to do the same. All right?

Now, here's the problem that we confront -- and this is a solvable problem. I've got -- there are some problems that are really hard to solve; this is actually one that we can solve. And that is -- the problem is that the baby boomers -- there were a lot of them, and they're getting older. Even though they deny it, they're getting older. (Laughter.) So what's happening is you're getting a big bulge of people who are retiring and you've got fewer workers supporting more retirees. That means you got more money going out, less money coming in -- and so you get a mismatch.

Now, what's been happening is, up until very recently we've been running a surplus in the Social Security account. So there should be enough money -- and if we were wise then all that money would be there and then we -- we're going to start running a deficit as the baby boomers start retiring, but we would have accumulated all this money and everything would be fine.

But a couple of things have happened. Number one is that the Social Security trust fund -- there wasn't a fence around it so people started borrowing out of it for other things. That's not helpful. But the other part of it is, is that there's still going to be a gap if we don't do anything -- even if we repay all the money into the trust fund, there's still a gap because there are too many retirees.

So it's not that Social Security would go away, Jay; the problem would be that by the time you retire, you'd be getting 75 cents for every dollar that was promised to you. So you'd get cheated out of a little bit of your Social Security. That's why -- when people say Social Security is going bankrupt, that's not true. The problem is not that it's going bankrupt; the problem is just that your benefit

-- it would be the equivalent of a benefit cut of about 25 percent if we don't start making some changes.

Now, there are only a handful of ways to make these changes. Number one, you could just keep on trying to borrow a trillion dollars, or a couple trillion, or however much it takes from China. But that's not such a good solution, because you'd end up having to pay interest on it and at some point they're just going to be tired of lending to us because they've got their own senior citizens that they want to take care off.

Second option is to gradually raise the retirement age. Now, I don't think this is the best option just because we just talked to an auto worker over here -- that's hard work. And if people's -- if the retirement age is already 67, and now you want to get it up to 68 or 69, if you're working on an assembly line, and you've been doing that for 50 years, or 40 years, that's some tough stuff. If you're a senator, you can work until, you know -- (laughter) -- but if you're doing real work -- (laughter and applause) -- now that's -- except for Claire. Claire does some real work. Claire is a hard worker. Claire is a hard worker. (Applause.)

You could cut benefits. You could raise the tax on everybody, so everybody's payroll tax goes up a little bit. Or you can do what I think is probably the best solution, which is you can raise the cap on the payroll tax. (Applause.)

Now, let me explain one last point about this. Whether you are Bill Gates, or you are Jay, a junior at Fox High School, you pay the same rate on your payroll tax, but what happens is, is that it gets capped out at $102,000. Now, the majority of people here, for almost everybody here, what that means is, is that you pay a payroll tax on every dime that you earn. But if you're Bill Gates, that means you're only paying payroll tax on 1/10th of 1 percent of what you earn, because you earn so much more -- $100,000, that's just the first fraction of what you earn, and then you stop paying it.

So what I've said is look, for wealthier people why don't we raise the cap? (Applause.) Make them pay a little more payroll tax. (Applause.) Not everybody is wild about this idea, not surprisingly. (Laughter.) And so what I would like to do -- I had a fiscal responsibility summit where I brought together Republicans, Democrats, experts on all these issues -- how do we start dealing with our long-term deficits, our long-term debt. I actually think that we could get all those folks together, and we could come up with a solution that would ensure stability of the Social Security system for a long, long time to come.

Let me just make this last point though. The big problem we have with entitlements is not Social Security, it's Medicare. Medicare and Medicaid, the two health care programs that the federal government helps support, those are the things that are really breaking the bank.

I know you've been hearing all these arguments about, oh, Obama is just spending crazy, look at these huge trillion-dollar deficits, blah, blah, blah. Well, let me make a point. Number one, we inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit -- that wasn't from my -- that wasn't me. (Applause.) That wasn't me. Number two, there is almost uniform consensus among economists that in the middle of the biggest crisis -- financial crisis since the Great Depression, we had to take extraordinary steps. So you've got a lot of Republican economists who agree that we had to do a stimulus package and we had to do something about the banks. Those are one-time charges, and they're big, and they'll make our deficits go up over the next two years. But those aren't the problem that we face long term.

What we face long term, the biggest problem we have is that Medicare and Medicaid -- health care costs are sky-rocketing, and at the same time as the population is getting older, which means we're using more health care -- you combine those two things, and if we aren't careful, health care will consume so much of our budget that ultimately we won't be able to do anything else. We won't be able to provide financial assistance to students; we won't be able to help build green energy; we won't be able to help industries that get into trouble; we won't have a national park system; we won't be able to do what we're supposed to do on our veterans. Everything else will be pushed aside because of Medicare and Medicaid. That's the problem that we really confront.

That's why I've said we've got to have health reform this year -- (applause) -- to drive down costs and make health care affordable for American families, businesses and for our government. (Applause.)

So, you know, when you see -- those of you who are watching certain news channels that -- on which I'm not very popular -- (laughter) -- and you see folks waving tea bags around -- (laughter) -- let me just remind them that I am happy to have a serious conversation about how we are going to cut our health care costs down over the long term, how we're going to stabilize Social Security. Claire and I are working diligently to do basically a thorough audit of federal spending. But let's not play games and pretend that the reason is because of the Recovery Act, because that's just a fraction of the overall problem that we've got.

We are going to have to tighten our belts, but we're going to have to do it in an intelligent way, and we've got to make sure that the people who are helped are working American families. And we're not suddenly saying that the way to do this is to eliminate programs that help ordinary people and give more tax cuts to the wealthy. We tried that formula for eight years. It did not work, and I don't intend to go back to it. (Applause.)

All right, it's a young lady's turn. It's your turn? (Laughter.) No, I'm going to call on her. I might call on you later, though.

All right, go ahead.

Q I'm a licensed acupuncturist and licensed massage therapist in Florissant. And so --

THE PRESIDENT: I could use one right now. (Laughter.) My back is stiff. I've been working hard.

Q I'll be happy to help you. (Laughter.) And this kind of fits into what you were just talking about as far as health care. I'm wondering, as a practitioner of Oriental medicine, knowing that the National Institutes of Health and the World Health Organization has discovered through their studies that alternative medicine often is more cost-effective and very effective, how will alternative medicine fit in your new health care program?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, look, my attitude is that we should -- we should do what works. So I think it is pretty well documented through scientific studies that acupuncture, for example, can be very helpful in relieving certain things like migraines and other ailments -- or at least as effective as more intrusive interventions.

I will let the science guide me. We just swore in an outstanding new Secretary of Health and Human Service, Kathleen Sebelius, former governor of Kansas. (Applause.) It's good to see that a Jay Hawk got applause on this side of the border here. (Laughter.) But she's going to do an outstanding job. And my charge to her is, as we're going through health care reform let's find out what works.

I think one basic principle that we know is that the more we do on the prevention side, the more we can obtain serious savings down the road. So giving children early checkups, making sure that they get immunized, making sure that they are diagnosed if they've got eyesight problems, making sure that they're taught proper nutrition to avoid a life of obesity -- those are all issues that we have some control over. And if we're making those investments, we will save huge amounts of money in the long-term.

Unfortunately, the hardest thing to do in politics -- and certainly in health care reform -- has been to get policymakers to make investments early that will have long-term payoffs. Because people -- their attitude is, well, I'll be out of office by the time that kid grows up; and, the fact that they're healthy, that doesn't help me. And in the private sector insurance system, oftentimes insurers make the same calculation. Their attitude is, well, people change jobs enough for us to pay for the preventive medicine now when the problem may not crop up for another 20 years and they'll be long out of our system, so we don't want to reimburse it because it will make things more costly. That's the logic of our health care system that we're going to have to change.

The recovery package put a huge amount in prevention. We are, in our budget, calling for significant increases in prevention. And my hope is, is that working in a bipartisan fashion we are going to be able to get a health care reform bill on my desk before the end of the year that will start seeing the kinds of investments that will make everybody healthier. All right? (Applause.)

Okay, it's a man's turn. It's a guy's turn, it's a guy's turn. This gentleman right here, he raised his hand. Go ahead. Yes, sir -- hold on, wait for your -- now, are you an elected official, by the way?

Q No, sir.

THE PRESIDENT: Okay, good. Because elected officials, you guys can't hog the mic right now.

Q No, sir. I'm a pastor.

THE PRESIDENT: Oh, God bless you. (Laughter.)

Q Mt. Sinai Baptist Church in the City of St. Louis. My question has to do with foreign policy. While we spend so much money with Afghanistan and in other parts of the world, fighting and what have you, on the continent of Africa -- Sudan, Darfur and other places -- the poverty level is so high, so many people are dying. Is there a chance in your administration that we would be able to build in that area? (Applause.)

THE PRESIDENT: It's a good question. Let me, first of all, say that whatever arguments we had about Iraq, I think we've been able to build a consensus that it is time for us to bring our troops home and give responsibility over to the Iraqis. (Applause.)

We are doing it in a careful way, because we don't want the country to collapse -- that would not be in our strategic interests. There's been recent flare-ups of violence in Iraq that are highly sensationalized, and that indicates the degree to which this is a ramp-down that is conducted over the course of 18 months. I think that's the right thing to do.

In Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan, we do have real problems with the Taliban and al Qaeda. They are the single most direct threat to our national security interests. And I had some grumblings and complaints from certain factions in the Democratic Party when I made a decision to send 17,000 additional troops there. I understand people's concerns. But as Commander-in-Chief it is my responsibility to make sure that bin Laden and his cronies are not able to create a safe haven within which they can kill another 3,000 Americans or more. That's an obligation that I have. (Applause.)

Now, having said that both on Iraq and Afghanistan I think we're doing the right thing, I think it's difficult; it's going to require a new strategy that mixes not just military action, but also includes diplomacy and development. We can't neglect these other parts of the world. So I've appointed a special envoy, a Major General Scott Gration, a very close friend of mine, was one of the top fighter pilots in our military, in our Armed Forces, and somebody who's also an expert on development issues. He just returned from Sudan. We are trying to find a way to create peace and stability that will allow the kind of humanitarian assistance that's needed to take effect in that country.

But you're making a broader point, which is there are a lot of countries, not just in Africa, but in Asia, and Eastern Europe, et cetera, that need our help. And sometimes people ask me, why should we help other countries when we've got so much to do here at home? I mean, foreign aid is very unpopular. I'm telling you, it's probably the single most unpopular thing. If you just ask the average American, they'll say, why should we be giving money to other countries?

And people usually grossly overestimate how much our foreign aid budget is. If you ask people, they'll say, well, we give 10 percent of our federal budget away in foreign aid. Actually, it's 1 percent. We give less in foreign aid than any other wealthy country as a percentage of our GDP.

Here is the reason why it's important. The reason why it's important is that a lot of times we can advance our national interests more effectively by showing that we are interested in the well-being of the people of other countries. That makes those countries more predisposed to work with us on a whole range of issues that are very important to us. It's an important tool for us to be able to meet our national security interests.

So, for example -- let me just give you one very specific example. If in Latin America, where I just returned, people see that we are sending doctors and teachers and Peace Corps workers into these communities, then that's the face of America; when it come time for them to help us on drug interdiction, it's a lot easier for the President of a Colombia or a Mexico to ally themselves with us because we're known to the Mexican people or the Colombian people as good friends, as people who care about them. And that may actually then ultimately save us money in the long term because we don't end up having to send troops in and do some things ourselves, because we've got allies to work with us.

So not only is it the right thing to do from a ethical and moral perspective, but it is also good strategy. And so I have said to the Congress, even in these difficult times we need to do some additional work in terms of foreign assistance, because it will save money for us -- and lives, blood and treasure for us -- in the long term.

I mean, right now everybody is concerned about the swine flu, and properly so. This is a potentially serious issue, and we've got to monitor it very carefully. But think about it. If Mexico has a good strong public health system that is catching these things early, ultimately that's going to save us money, because flu gets contained. And a lot of the threats that we're going to be facing, whether it's international terrorism, cyber terrorism, nuclear proliferation, pandemic, climate change -- a lot of these issues, they cross borders. So it's not like we can just draw a moat around America, and say, I'm sorry, don't bother us; keep your problems outside. It just doesn't work that way.

People get on planes from Africa, and will bring a disease right here to our doorstep, because we weren't concerned about whether or not they had a public health system that could catch these diseases early. So this is all part of our interests, and not just other people's.

All right. Okay. I was told that I have time for one more question. I want to -- I'm sorry guys, but I'm going to go with a student -- (applause) -- because young people, this is their school. But I want a young lady, because it's a young lady's turn. This young lady right here, this is the one, the one with the lei on here.

All right, there you go. She looks ready with a good question. (Applause.)

Q It's an honor to meet you, President Obama.

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you so much. What is your name?

Q I'm a fourth grader. I was curious, how is your administration planning to be more environmentally friendly? (Applause.)

THE PRESIDENT: Well, that is just a great question. You're a very poised and articulate fourth grader. (Applause.) Yes, isn't she impressive? (Applause.) Yes, absolutely. We might have to run you for President some day. (Applause.)

Well, there are some short-term things we can do, and there are some long-term things we can do. On the short-term list, we already, for example, passed a historic public lands bill that creates many more acres of public space that is environmentally protected -- (applause) -- from logging and from other -- from mining and from other uses. And that I think is going to be very important.

Now, in some cases what we do is we balance the need for economic growth, but we do it in a sustainable way. There doesn't have to be a contradiction between jobs and the environment, we just have to be thinking a little smarter. So, for example, when it comes to forestry, there's nothing wrong with us cutting down some trees for timber, as long as you make sure that it's done in a sequence and is spaced properly so that the forest itself is sustained.

Sometimes these debates become this all-or-nothing thing: either commercial interests can do anything they want -- dump stuff in the oceans and tear down all the forests, and that's the only way we can get economic growth; or alternatively, everybody is hugging trees and you can't cut a tree. You know, there's a balance that can be struck, and the key principle is sustainability. Are what we are doing -- will it ensure that you have this incredible treasure we call America when you grow up, for your kids, so you can take them into a park, so sportsmen or fishermen can enjoy it. That's the key.

Now, there is a long-term problem that we've got to deal with, and that's is a tough one. And that is this issue of climate change. I want to tell you the truth here because this is going to be a debate that we're going to be having over the course of the next year. The average person probably thinks, yes, climate change, that's kind of a drag, but it's not one of my top priorities -- because you don't really see it or feel it, it doesn't hit your pocketbook, it doesn't have to do with your job directly. And so the tendency is just to kind of push it off. People think, well, this just has to do with polar bears, and I feel bad about polar bears but I've got other things to worry about.

I don't think people fully appreciate the potential damage -- economic damage, as well as environmental damage -- that could be done if we are not serious in dealing with this problem. If the temperature goes up a couple of degrees, well, it will change weather patterns pretty significantly. It could create droughts in places where we haven't had drought; it could bring insect-born diseases up into places like Missouri that we haven't seen before. But we can probably manage. If the temperature of the planet goes up 5 degrees, you're now looking at coastlines underwater. You're now looking at huge, cataclysmic hurricanes, complete changes in weather patterns. Some places will get hotter, some places will get colder. Our economy would be disrupted by tens of trillions of dollars.

So this is no joke. And the science shows that the planet is getting warmer faster than people expected. Even the most dire warnings, it's gotten -- it's moved forward faster than anybody expected. They're talking about, just in a few years, during the summer, there won't be any ice in the Arctic, something we have never seen before. So we have to do something about it.

Now, the question, again, is how do you do it in an intelligent way? There are some people who would say this is such a big problem that you just got to shut everything down. Well, I'm sorry, that's not going to happen. People have got to go to work, and we've got to drive, we've got to fly places. Our economy has to grow.

But there are ways that we can do it that are intelligent and smart. And I think one of the best ways to do it is to say, in a gradual way, let's set a cap, a ceiling, on the carbon pollution that comes out of all sorts of places: our utilities, our cars, our industries. Let's take a look at all the carbon that's being sent into the atmosphere that's causing climate change, and let's say that each year we're going to reduce the allowable amount in total that is released.

And what we'll do to each industry is we'll say we're going to make a deal with you: Come up with ways to improve your processes and bring pollution down, and you can make money by sending out less pollution; on the other hand, if you have more pollution than you were allowed, then you're going to have to pay money. You start creating a market for the clean energy, and you start making it less economical to produce harmful energy.

Now, if we do that in a smart, gradual way and in a way that protects consumers from the initial attempts of utilities, for example, to pass on those costs to consumers -- which is what they'll try to do, so we've got to rebate some of that money to make sure that people are held harmless -- then I actually think that we can get control of this problem, we can save the polar bears, but more importantly we can make sure that we are preserving our economy.

And here is the great opportunity. Everybody knows that we're going to have to do this. The country that gets there fastest, the country that's the first one to figure out really good battery technology for a plug-in hybrid car, the first country that perfects wind power and solar power and knows how to get it from one place to another in an efficient way, that country will dominate the economy of the 21st century the same way that America dominated the 20th century. I want that to be America. That's what we're fighting for. (Applause.)

All right, everybody, I had a good time. Thank you. (Applause.)

Flashback: The Bush Administration Knew It was Torture

Just compiling notes for the book and came across this account from Alberto Mora, who was General Counsel for the United States Navy in the Bush Administration, of a conversation with John Yoo of the White House Office of Legal Counsel:

On February 6th [2003], Mora invited Yoo to his office, in the Pentagon, to discuss the opinion. Mora asked him, “Are you saying the President has the authority to order torture?”

“Yes,” Yoo replied.

“I don’t think so,” Mora said.

“I’m not talking policy,” Yoo said. “I’m just talking about the law.”

“Well, where are we going to have the policy discussion, then?” Mora asked.

...Yoo replied that he didn’t know; maybe, he suggested, it would take place inside the Pentagon, where the defense-policy experts were.

The draft [Pentagon] working-group report noted that the Uniform Code of Military Justice barred “maltreatment” but said, “Legal doctrine could render specific conduct, otherwise criminal, not unlawful.” In an echo of the Torture Memo, it also declared that interrogators could be found guilty of torture only if their “specific intent” was to inflict “severe physical pain or suffering” as evidenced by “prolonged mental harm.” Even then, it said, echoing Yoo, the Commander-in-Chief could order torture if it was a military necessity: “Congress may no more regulate the President’s ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield.”

Enduring America Special: Why Torture Matters

Featured Post: Andy Worthington - Who Ordered the Torture of Abu Zubaydah?
Featured Post: Mark Danner - If Everyone Knew, Who’s to Blame?
Featured Post: Frank Rich - Why Torture Matters: The Banality of Bush White House Evil

This morning, I was catching up with the newspapers when a friend/reader Skyped about our recent item, "Dick Cheney's Fox Interview and the Defence of Torture": "Surely there must be some date by which I can hope to never ever see Cheney's face on EA again."

While I could understand the sentiment, it also brought on depression about how this torture discussion will probably "go away". The barrage of news stories and commentary --- now that many in the American "mainstream" media, with the Bush Administration in the rear-view mirror, has decided torture should be noticed --- brings on fatigue. Now that Cheney, formerly the most secretive Vice President in history, has decided that he will incessantly shine his own distorted light on "enhanced interrogation", I have the sense from his smirk that he knows he is wearing us down.

Meanwhile, beyond the shrillness of knee-jerk comment on torture protecting us from another 9-11 and the silliness of "what's wrong with putting man in a box with a caterpillar?", those who claim a bit of knowledge are spinning the reasons why we should just walk away. It's not just the former Bush Administration officials --- now Porter Goss, the former (hapless) Director of the CIA, is writing, "We can't have a secret intelligence service if we keep giving away all the secrets", when the only secret in danger is who in the Bush Administration authorised torture and when.

David Ignatius in The Washington Post plays sage referee, "[The Obama Administration] needs to take care that the sunlight of exposure doesn't blind its shadow warriors", even though the exposure does not threaten our "shadow warriors" but those who have now left office. Walter Pincus, the long-time intelligence beat reporter of The Post loses both the plot, "The CIA Will Pay the Price", and his grip on facts, spreading the implication (discredited by his own newspaper) that torture provided valuable intelligence:

The pages of the Justice Department opinions contain many references to important information learned from Abu Zubaida and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

And David Broder, in a piece that should stand as a reminder of why eminent journalists are not toothless but complicit in the
activities of the Government they claim to watch, reduces the quest for answers and, yes, justice to "an unworthy desire for vengeance".

It's enough to make me throw up hands and settle for the complications of a policy on Iran or Afghanistan or even a light-hearted look at the latest escapade in the Culture Wars. Then, in the midst of this growing depression, I remembered that I wrote last October:

How did an American government, in the name of "freedom" and "democracy", sanction these activities?

The demand for that answer should never be given up. By coincidence, a book titled After Bush is being formally launched in London today. Amongst its many egregious errors, distortions, and distractions is this sentence: "'Prisoner abuses’ were aberrations --- recurrent in every war --- rather than the logical consequence of the authority under which Bush acted.”

These were abuses --- without the quote marks. They were not aberrations. They were not just the logical outcomes, they were the intended outcomes of a policy developed from September 2001 by the Bush Administration, led by a Vice President dedicated to the expansion of his personal power and that of the Executive, supported by second-level officials like John Yoo happy to promote their own perversions of legality, and abetted by colleagues from Condoleezza Rice to Colin Powell to George Tenet who were either too cowed to fight back or too intent on covering their own backsides.

Any attempt to pretend otherwise, that we can just whisk away torture as a silly little aberration, is a disgrace to those of us who believe that "America" should stand for something beyond the expedient and the power-hungry.

I still believe that. So today Enduring America features three opinion pieces and analyses --- by Frank Rich of The New York Times and by historians Mark Danner and Andy Worthington, that offer both answers and reasons why we should never forget.

Why Torture Matters: Who Ordered the Torture of Abu Zubaydah?

Featured Post: Mark Danner - If Everyone Knew, Who’s to Blame?
Featured Post: Frank Rich - Why Torture Matters: The Banality of Bush White House Evil

Andy Worthington in AlterNet

For the defendants of the use of torture by U.S. forces -- still led by former Vice President Dick Cheney -- this has been a rocky few weeks, with the publication, in swift succession, of the leaked report by the International Committee of the Red Cross (PDF), based on interviews with the 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2006, which concluded that their treatment “constituted torture” (and was accompanied by two detailed articles by Mark Danner for the New York Review of Books), the release, by the Justice Department, of four memos issued by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in 2002 and 2005, which purported to justify the use of torture by the CIA, and the release of a 231-page investigation into detainee abuse conducted by the Senate Armed Services Committee (PDF.)

The publication of the full Senate Committee report was delayed for four months, subject to wrangling over proposed redactions, but the Executive Summary, published last December, had already successfully demolished the Bush administration’s claims that detainee abuse could be blamed on “a few bad apples,” and, instead, blamed it on senior officials who, with the slippery exception of Dick Cheney, included George W. Bush, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff David Addington, former Pentagon General Counsel William J. Haynes II, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former Justice Department legal adviser John Yoo, former Guantánamo commanders Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey and Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the former commander of coalition forces in Iraq.

Much of the fallout from the release of these memos and reports has, understandably, focused on the inadequacy of the legal advice offered to the CIA for its “high-value detainee” program by the OLC, whose lawyers have the unique responsibility of interpreting the law as it relates to the powers of the executive branch, and whose advice, therefore, provided the Bush administration with what it regarded as a “golden shield,” which would prevent senior officials from being prosecuted for war crimes. However, if it can be shown that the OLC’s advice was not only inadequate, but also tailored to specific requests from senior officials, then it may be that the “golden shield” will turn to dust.

This threat to the “golden shield” probably explain why Dick Cheney’s scaremongering has been shriller than usual in the last few weeks, but what has largely been overlooked to date is another question that poses even weightier challenges for the former administration: if the use of torture techniques on Abu Zubaydah, the first supposedly significant “high-value detainee” captured by the US (on March 28, 2002), was authorized by two OLC memos issued on August 1, 2002, then who authorized the torture to which he was subjected in the 18 weeks between his capture and the moment that Jay S. Bybee, the head of the OLC, added his signature to the OLC memos?

It’s clear that the major reason this question has been overlooked is because, as the ICRC report reveals, Zubaydah was not subjected to waterboarding (an ancient torture technique that involves controlled drowning) until after the memo was issued, but what is also apparent is that the treatment to which he was subjected before the waterboard was introduced also “constituted torture.”

Zubaydah was severely wounded during his capture in Faisalabad, Pakistan, to the extent that, as President Bush explained in a press conference in September 2006, shortly after Zubaydah and 13 other “high-value detainees” had been transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons, “he survived only because of the medical care arranged by the CIA.” We don’t know if there is any truth to the allegation, made by Ron Suskind in his 2006 book The One Percent Doctrine, that medication was only administered in exchange for his cooperation (it seems likely, but has been officially denied), but we do know, from James Risen’s book State of War, that when CIA director George Tenet told the President that Zubaydah had been put on pain medication to deal with the injuries he sustained during capture, Bush asked Tenet, “Who authorized putting him on pain medication?” which prompted Risen to wonder whether the President was “implicitly encouraging” Tenet to order the harsh treatment of a prisoner “without the paper trail that would have come from a written presidential authorization.”

We also know that, shortly after his capture, Zubaydah was flown to Thailand, to a secret underground prison provided by the Thai government, where, as a New York Times article in September 2006 explained, “he was stripped, held in an icy room and jarred by earsplittingly loud music -- the genesis of practices later adopted by some within the military, and widely used by the Central Intelligence Agency in handling prominent terrorism suspects at secret overseas prisons.”

The details of his treatment, “based on accounts by former and current law enforcement and intelligence officials,” were even more shocking. We have become somewhat inured, over the years, to stories of prisoners deprived of sleep for disturbing long periods of time, in which the use of loud, non-stop music -- in this case, the Red Hot Chili Peppers -- played an integral part.

This in itself is unacceptable, as the use of music is not simply a matter of being forced to listen to the same song over and over again at ear-splitting volume, but is, instead, a component in a program of sleep deprivation and isolation designed to provoke a complete mental breakdown. One of the major reference points for the CIA in the 1950s, when it was deeply involved in investigating the efficacy of psychological torture techniques, was research conducted by Donald Hebb, a Canadian psychologist, who discovered that, “if subjects are confined without light, odor, sound, or any fixed references of time and place, very deep breakdowns can be provoked,” and that, within just 48 hours, those held in what he termed “perceptual isolation” can be reduced to semi-psychotic states.

However, while some interpretation and empathy is required to understand the impact on Abu Zubaydah of his profound isolation in this period, in which, as the Times also reported, he was largely cut off from all human interaction, only occasionally punctuated by an interrogator entering his cell, saying, “You know what I want,” and then leaving, there is no denying the visceral impact of the following description. “At times, Mr. Zubaydah, still weak from his wounds, was stripped and placed in a cell without a bunk or blankets,” the Times explained. “He stood or lay on the bare floor, sometimes with air-conditioning adjusted so that, one official said, Mr. Zubaydah seemed to turn blue” (emphasis added).

Further information about Zubaydah’s treatment in Thailand has not emerged in great detail. In The Dark Side, Jane Mayer noted only that he was “held naked in a small cage, like a dog,” and the ICRC report focused instead on his detention in Afghanistan, from May 2002 to February 2003. What we do know, however, from the Senate Committee’s report, is that an FBI agent was so appalled by his treatment at the hands of CIA agents that he “raised objections to these techniques to the CIA and told the CIA it was ‘borderline torture,’” and that, sometime later, FBI director Robert Mueller “decided that FBI agents would not participate in interrogations involving techniques the FBI did not normally use in the United States.” We also know from Jane Mayer that R. Scott Shumate, the chief operational psychologist for the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, left his job in 2003, apparently disgusted by developments involving the use of the “enhanced interrogation techniques,” and that “associates described him as upset in particular about the treatment of Zubaydah.”

Moreover, although the ICRC report dealt only with Zubaydah’s treatment in Afghanistan, it’s also clear that the techniques to which he was subjected in Afghanistan, in the approximately two and a half months before the OLC memos were signed, also “constituted torture.”

In his statement to the ICRC, Zubaydah explained how, even before the waterboarding began, he was strapped naked to a chair for several weeks in a cell that was “air-conditioned and very cold,” deprived of food, subjected to extreme sleep deprivation for two to three weeks -- partly by means of loud music or incessant noise, and partly because, “If I started to fall asleep one of the guards would come and spray water in my face” -- and, for the rest of the time, until the waterboarding began, was subjected to further sleep deprivation, and kept in a state of perpetual fear.

This array of techniques undoubtedly appears less dramatic than the “real torturing” that followed (in which the waterboarding was accompanied by physical brutality, hooding, the daily shaving of his hair and beard, and confinement in small boxes), but, again, it is critical to try to imagine what two to three weeks of chronic sleep deprivation actually means, and to recall that, by the time Steven G. Bradbury, the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General, revised the approval for torture techniques in May 2005, it was noted that it was only considered acceptable to subject a prisoner to 180 hours (seven and a half days) of sleep deprivation.

To understand how torture came to be used before it was officially approved, we need to return to the New York Times article of September 2006, which explained how, according to accounts by three former intelligence officials, the CIA “understood that the legal foundation for its role had been spelled out in a sweeping classified directive” signed by President Bush on September 17, 2001, which authorized the agency “to capture, detain and interrogate terrorism suspects.”

Significantly, this “memorandum of notification” did not spell out specific guidelines for interrogations, but as later research, and the latest reports have confirmed, the directive led to focused efforts by the CIA, and by William J. Haynes II, the Pentagon’s General Counsel (and a protégé of Dick Cheney), to contact foreign governments for advice on harsh interrogation techniques, and to begin a relationship with a number of individuals involved in the Joint Personnel Recovery Program (JPRA), the body responsible for administering the SERE program (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape), which is taught at U.S. military schools.

Designed to teach military personnel how to resist interrogation if captured by a hostile enemy, the SERE program uses outlawed techniques derived from techniques used on captured U.S. soldiers during the Korean War to elicit deliberately false confessions, and includes, as the Senate Committee report explained, “stripping detainees of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, disrupting their sleep, treating them like animals, subjecting them to loud music and flashing lights, and exposing them to extreme temperatures.” In some circumstances, the techniques also include waterboarding, and, as numerous sources -- including the recently released reports and memos -- have revealed over the last few years, the reverse-engineering of the SERE techniques constituted the bedrock of the administration’s interrogation program, from Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo to the secret dungeons of the CIA.

As we also know, from the pioneering research conducted by Jane Mayer, by the time that the CIA took over Zubaydah’s interrogation from the FBI, in April 2002, the team included Dr. David Mitchell, a retired Air Force SERE psychologist. Thanks to the detailed timeline provided by the Senate Committee, we now know that it was Haynes who first inquired about the applicability of the SERE program to the interrogation of prisoners in December 2001, and we also know that, in April 2002, while “experienced intelligence officers were making recommendations to improve intelligence collection” -- which, noticeably, included an assessment by Col. Stuart A. Herrington, a retired Army intelligence officer, that a regime based solely on punishment “detracts from the flexibility that debriefers require to accomplish their mission” -- “JPRA officials with no training or experience were working on their own exploitation plan,” and a colleague of Mitchell’s, Bruce Jessen, a senior SERE psychologist, was providing recommendations for JPRA involvement in the “exploitation of select al-Qaeda detainees” in an “exploitation facility” to be established especially for the purpose -- which, presumably, turned out to be the secret dungeon provided by the Thai government.

We also know from Mayer that discussions about the CIA’s proposed interrogation techniques, in April 2002, involved numerous other senior officials -- beyond the key involvement of Haynes -- in meetings in the White House’s Situation Room that were chaired by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and attended by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tenet, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, and, moreover, that the level of detail provided by Tenet appalled Ashcroft to such an extent that he lamented, “History will not judge us kindly.”

This is disturbing enough, but what makes it even more chilling is the realization that the tactics being discussed, which, it is clear, led swiftly to their enactment in actual interrogations, were some months away from being authorized by the OLC. As the Times article explained, in what was perhaps its most damning passage, “Three former intelligence officials said the techniques had been drawn up on the basis of legal guidance from the Justice Department, but were not yet supported by a formal legal opinion.”

In my book, this means that, regardless of the validity of the OLC’s opinions, those who authorized the torture of Abu Zubaydah between March 28 and July 31, 2002 are not protected by the OLC’s supposed “golden shield,” and should be prosecuted for contravening the prohibition on the use of torture that, since 1988, has been enshrined in U.S. law. This may not apply to all of those who attended the meetings in the White House (plus Haynes), but it’s inconceivable that the CIA began subjecting Abu Zubaydah to chronic isolation and sleep deprivation with receiving approval from somebody in high office.

It remains to be seen, however, whether the Obama administration is committed to abiding by the laws that President Obama praised so lavishly during his election campaign, or whether, instead, he and his administration are committed to reading from a different book: How to Torture With Impunity And Get Away With It, by former Vice President Dick Cheney and an array of associates, all intoxicated with the thrill of unfettered executive power, which concludes by claiming that you get away with breaking any damn law that you please, so long as you’re voted out of office at the end.

Why Torture Matters: If Everyone Knew, Who's to Blame?

Featured Post: Andy Worthington - Who Ordered the Torture of Abu Zubaydah?
Featured Post: Frank Rich - Why Torture Matters: The Banality of Bush White House Evil

Mark Danner in The Washington Post

Here's a question: When was the last time American officials waterboarded a detainee? Well, that would be 2003 -- six years ago. Here's another: When did Americans first find out about it? That would be 2004 -- five years ago. May 13, 2004, to be precise, in an article in the New York Times that informed readers that "C.I.A. interrogators used graduated levels of force, including a technique known as 'water boarding,' in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown."

The first paradox of the torture scandal is that it is not about things we didn't know but about things we did know and did nothing about. Beginning more than a half-dozen years ago, Bush administration officials broke the law and did repugnant things to detainees under their control. But if you think that the remedy is simple and clear -- that all officials who broke the law should be tried and punished -- then ask yourself what exactly the political elite of the country has been doing for the last five years. Or what it has not been doing. And why.

However much we would like the scandal to be confined to the story of what was done in those isolated rooms on the other side of the world where interrogators plied their arts, and in the air-conditioned government offices where officials devised "legal" rationales, the story includes a second narrative that tells of a society that knew about these things and chose to do nothing.

Unlike Watergate or Iran-contra, today's scandal emerges not from a shocking revelation of wrongdoing but from a long process of disclosure during which Americans have stared at blatant lawbreaking with apparent equanimity. This means Democrats as well as Republicans, including those in Congress who were willing to approve, as late as September 2006, a law, the Military Commissions Act, that purported to shield those who had applied these "enhanced interrogation techniques" from prosecution under the War Crimes Act.

Though they could have filibustered the bill, Democrats let it pass into law. The midterm elections loomed, and it was no secret that the president had introduced the bill partly as a trap -- a little bait that might allow any Democrat who spoke up against it to be accused of wanting to "coddle terrorists." Having been burned by the "politics of fear" in 2002 and 2004, Democrats stood aside. Six weeks later, they won control of Congress.

The dirty little secret of the torture scandal and of all the loud expressions of outrage now clogging the country's airwaves is that until very recently, the politics of torture cut in the opposite direction. This is why, although we have known the general narrative of torture since the summer of 2004, most politicians have been loath to do anything about it. Republicans ordered it and, then as now, supported its use -- as long as they could call it something else. Democrats, on the defensive since 9/11 as the party of weakness on national security, saw no interest in taking up a cause perceived to be deeply unpopular. In the wake of 9/11, taking the gloves off was a badge of authenticity. Did Democrats really want to make themselves the party that stood for the rights of Khalid Sheik Mohammed?

The answer to this question, until recently, was no -- as long, that is, as Americans could be assured that torture, called by whatever euphemism, was necessary to keep the country safe. Which is why Republicans from Dick Cheney on down have been unflagging in their arguments that these "enhanced interrogation techniques . . . were absolutely crucial" to preventing "a major-casualty attack." This argument, still strongly supported by a great many Americans, is deeply pernicious, for it holds that it is impossible to protect the country without breaking the law. It says that the professed principles of the United States, if genuinely adhered to, doom the country to defeat. It reduces our ideals and laws to a national decoration, to be discarded at the first sign of danger.

This is why torture is at its heart a political scandal and why its resolution lies in destroying the thing done, not the people who did it. It is this idea of torture that must be destroyed: torture as a badge worn proudly to prove oneself willing to "do anything" to protect the country. That leads to the second paradox of torture: Even after all we know, the political task at hand -- the first task, without which none of the others, including prosecutions, can follow -- remains one of full and patient and relentless revelation of what was done and what it cost the country, authoritative revelation undertaken by respected people of both parties whose words will be heard and believed.

The outlines, long known, are being filled in. Several weeks ago I published in the New York Review of Books the report of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which gave detailed first-person accounts of those who were tortured at "the black sites." Shortly thereafter, the Obama administration released four memorandums written by Justice Department lawyers that "made legal" the torture described in the Red Cross report. These are chilling documents, linked hand in hand in a bureaucratic danse macabre: detainees' accounts of what was clearly torture and lawyers' twisted rationale of why it was not.

The irony is that those Justice Department memos were written for just this moment: the moment when all would come to light. That they exist is a chronicle of scandal foretold. The memos are the true offspring of the Church Commission, the mid-1970s investigation of CIA wrongdoing that looms over this scandal and that changed forever how covert actions were conducted. Before Church, "black ops" were undertaken with no explicit legal order: If wrongdoing came to light, the president denied knowledge. After Church, the president was required to sign a "finding" making approval explicit. For former Vice President Cheney and others, the findings and other reforms that followed from Church -- including FISA and other laws that limited the president's power to use the CIA -- were in essence when "the gloves went on."

And so, after 9/11, when the gloves came off, there would be no deniability: All was documented with lawyers' briefs and study group reports and official signatures. That leads to the third paradox of torture: Responsibility is spread so broadly, beginning, as they say, "at the highest level," that the political problem is not whether, eventually, to prosecute but whom, and how high. Too many are implicated: George Tenet and others at the CIA saw to that. They foresaw precisely this moment, and they were determined, when the music stopped, not to be the only ones left standing with no chair.

And now, as the great clangorous machinery of Washington scandal rumbles into life, everywhere one looks former officials stand, without chairs and without places to hide.

If justice is allowed to follow its course, then some prosecutions will eventually come, but they alone cannot lead us back to political health. For that, President Obama and Congress need to authorize an authoritative bipartisan investigation of what was done and how, for that is the only way to destroy definitively the idea that the United States must torture to defend itself. For the moment, the president, an ambitious leader who wants to "look forward" and not back, sees only the political costs of such an inquiry, which will be considerable. But the country has already incurred those costs and the damage in not paying them now will be far greater.

Like most mystiques built on secrecy, the mystique of torture will only disappear once a cold hard light has been shone on it by trustworthy people who can examine all the evidence and speak to the country with authority. We need an investigation that will ruthlessly analyze the controversial and persistent assertions that torture averted attacks and will place alongside them the evidence that it has done great harm to the United States, not only to the country's reputation for following and upholding the law but also to its ability to render justice. In torturing Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his fellows we have created a class of permanent martyrs, unjustly imprisoned in the eyes of the world because they cannot be legitimately tried and punished. We have let torture destroy justice.

Those who break the law should be punished. This includes those who torture no less than those who kill. But prosecutions of those who tortured, if they come before a public investigation, will not end the argument. On the contrary, they will appear to much of the country as yet another partisan turn in the bitter politics of national security, launched to persecute those who only did what was necessary to protect the country. They will encourage those who defend torture to espouse even more bitterly a corrosive counter-narrative according to which only those who torture can be trusted to protect Americans.

To expose this dark counter-narrative to the light of day, to flood it with light and then destroy it, is the vital political task, not only for today but for tomorrow, when the pressures to believe it, in the wake of a further act of mass destruction could well prove irresistible. If that happens, America will become something wholly different -- and the paradoxes of torture will have entangled us all.