Wednesday, November 12, 2008 12:30 PM

Executive Orders Offer 'Quick Fix' On Torture

By SHANE HARRIS

Calls are coming in for President-elect Obama to take quick and decisive action on interrogation and detention of terrorist suspects. Today, Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., who chairs an intelligence oversight panel, said that when Obama takes office in January, he should immediately issue an executive order to end the use of torture in interrogations.

As National Journal recently reported (subscription), Obama's administration will have to wrestle with a number of classified Justice Department legal opinions used by the Bush administration to support extraordinary interrogation methods, including waterboarding. It could take some time for Obama's attorney general to wade through all that paperwork, and the transition team probably still doesn't know precisely what the opinions authorized. But executive orders -- what Holt and others are calling for -- are a way for Obama to act without waiting to find out.

Obama could issue an order that says, essentially, "The use of torture is not allowed, period." The order could then define what he means by torture. Such an action would give the new administration an easy way to override Bush-era legal opinions and any programs or policies they might have spawned.

But executive orders alone won't fully resolve the legal issues underlying a range of important intelligence matters. While they carry the force of law, the orders can be overturned by another president, or another order. They are temporal by design, and an instrument of the kind of executive authority that, on several occasions, candidate Obama said President Bush used to excess.

That's not to say that executive orders aren't a legitimate and transparent use of presidential authority -- they are. But calls are already bubbling up from civil liberties groups and other strident critics of Bush-era policies for Obama to, more or less, operate like Bush -- use his presidential powers to set policy and not worry about changing the law. It will be worth watching, as the new administration gets its legs, how much of that "unitary" style of governance it actually embraces. Executive orders are, if nothing else, an efficient way to get things done.

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