Politics & Power Quote by Peter King

King’s line is a tidy example of Washington’s most reliable magic trick: condemning an atrocity while laundering the system that produced it. “I don’t know anyone at the highest levels” isn’t a fact so much as a boundary-setting device. It narrows culpability to the rung of the ladder where prosecutions are easiest and reputations are cheapest, preserving the legitimacy of the national security apparatus by insisting the rot never reaches the penthouse.

The phrasing does two things at once. First, it recasts Abu Ghraib as an aberration, a glitch in discipline rather than a foreseeable result of post-9/11 detention policy, permissive interrogation culture, and chain-of-command incentives. Second, it flatters power with a presumption of moral hygiene: “the highest levels” are, by definition, the place where decency lives. That’s the real subtext - not simply “no one ordered it,” but “people like us wouldn’t order it.”

Invoking Obama is strategic triangulation. King positions the new president as an enforcer of accountability while also pre-emptively constraining what accountability can mean. “If... for a moment thought” turns the question into a hypothetical about Obama’s temperament, not an empirical inquiry into memos, directives, and institutional responsibility. It’s faith-based oversight: if the president believed, he’d act. The implication is that belief is unnecessary because the premise is unthinkable.

Context matters: Abu Ghraib had already become a global symbol of American hypocrisy. King’s intent is damage control - to protect the idea that the U.S. government can commit crimes without the government, as an institution, being criminal.