Repulsive Democrat Hypocrisy

And this would be one of myriad reasons why I'm not a Democrat or Republican. I believe certain things that neither party supports, or if they SAY they do, they really don't, like shutting down Guantanamo. Obama has so many broken campaign promises, how can you trust him?--jef

WEDNESDAY, FEB 8, 2012 
BY GLENN GREENWALD - Salon.com

(updated below)

During the Bush years, Guantanamo was the core symbol of right-wing radicalism and what was back then referred to as the “assault on American values and the shredding of our Constitution”: so much so then when Barack Obama ran for President, he featured these issues not as a secondary but as a central plank in his campaign. But now that there is a Democrat in office presiding over Guantanamo and these other polices — rather than a big, bad, scary Republican — all of that has changed, as a new Washington Post/ABC News poll today demonstrates:

The sharpest edges of President Obama’s counterterrorism policy, including the use of drone aircraft to kill suspected terrorists abroad and keeping open the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have broad public support, including from the left wing of the Democratic Party.

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that Obama, who campaigned on a pledge to close the brig at Guantanamo Bay and to change national security policies he criticized as inconsistent with U.S. law and values, has little to fear politically for failing to live up to all of those promises.

The survey shows that 70 percent of respondents approve of Obama’s decision to keep open the prison at Guantanamo Bay. . . . The poll shows that 53 percent of self-identified liberal Democrats — and 67 percent of moderate or conservative Democrats — support keeping Guantanamo Bay open, even though it emerged as a symbol of the post-Sept. 11 national security policies of George W. Bush, which many liberals bitterly opposed.

Repulsive Democrat hypocrisy extends far beyond the issue of Guantanamo. A core plank in the Democratic critique of the Bush/Cheney civil liberties assault was the notion that the President could do whatever he wants, in secret and with no checks, to anyone he accuses without trial of being a Terrorist – even including eavesdropping on their communications or detaining them without due process. But President Obama has not only done the same thing, but has gone much farther than mere eavesdropping or detention: he has asserted the power even to kill citizens without due process. As Bush’s own CIA and NSA chief Michael Hayden said this week about the Awlaki assassination: “We needed a court order to eavesdrop on him but we didn’t need a court order to kill him. Isn’t that something?” That is indeed “something,” as is the fact that Bush’s mere due-process-free eavesdropping on and detention of American citizens caused such liberal outrage, while Obama’s due-process-free execution of them has not.

Beyond that, Obama has used drones to kill Muslim children and innocent adults by the hundreds. He has refused to disclose his legal arguments for why he can do this or to justify the attacks in any way. He has even had rescuers and funeral mourners deliberately targeted. As Hayden said: ”Right now, there isn’t a government on the planet that agrees with our legal rationale for these operations, except for Afghanistan and maybe Israel.” But that is all perfectly fine with most American liberals now that their Party’s Leader is doing it:

Fully 77 percent of liberal Democrats endorse the use of drones, meaning that Obama is unlikely to suffer any political consequences as a result of his policy in this election year. Support for drone strikes against suspected terrorists stays high, dropping only somewhat when respondents are asked specifically about targeting American citizens living overseas, as was the case with Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni American killed in September in a drone strike in northern Yemen.

The Post‘s Greg Sargent obtained the breakdown on these questions and wrote today:

The number of those who approve of the drone strikes drops nearly 20 percent when respondents are told that the targets are American citizens. But that 65 percent is still a very big number, given that these policies really should be controversial.

And get this: Depressingly, Democrats approve of the drone strikes on American citizens by 58-33, and even liberals approve of them, 55-35. Those numbers were provided to me by the Post polling team.

It’s hard to imagine that Dems and liberals would approve of such policies in quite these numbers if they had been authored by George W. Bush.

Indeed: is there even a single liberal pundit, blogger or commentator who would have defended George Bush and Dick Cheney if they (rather than Obama) had been secretly targeting American citizens for execution without due process, or slaughtering children, rescuers and funeral attendees with drones, or continuing indefinite detention even a full decade after 9/11? Please. How any of these people can even look in the mirror, behold the oozing, limitless intellectual dishonesty, and not want to smash what they see is truly mystifying to me.

One of the very first non-FISA posts I ever wrote that received substantial attention was this one from January, 2006, entitled “Do Bush Followers have an Ideology”? It examined the way in which the Bush-supporting Right was more like an “authoritarian cult” rather than a political movement because its adherents had no real, fixed political beliefs; instead, I argued, their only animating “principle” was loyalty to their leader, and they would support anything he did no matter how at odds it was with their prior ostensible beliefs. That post was linked to and praised by dozens and dozens of liberal blogs: can you believe what authoritarian followers these conservatives are?, they scoffed in unison. Here was the crux of my argument:

Whether one is a “liberal” — or, for that matter, a “conservative” — is now no longer a function of one’s actual political views, but is a function purely of one’s personal loyalty to George Bush. . . .

People who self-identify as “conservatives” and have always been considered to be conservatives become liberal heathens the moment they dissent, even on the most non-ideological grounds, from a Bush decree. That’s because “conservatism” is now a term used to describe personal loyalty to the leader (just as “liberal” is used to describe disloyalty to that leader), and no longer refers to a set of beliefs about government.

That “conservatism” has come to mean “loyalty to George Bush” is particularly ironic given how truly un-conservative the Administration is. . . .

And in that regard, people like Michelle Malkin, John Hinderaker, Jonah Goldberg and Hugh Hewitt are not conservatives. They are authoritarian cultists. Their allegiance is not to any principles of government but to strong authority through a single leader.

As this post demonstrates, long before Barack Obama achieved any significance on the political scene, I considered blind leader loyalty one of the worst toxins in our political culture: it’s the very antithesis of what a healthy political system requires (and what a healthy mind would produce). 

One of the reasons I’ve written so much about the complete reversal of progressives on these issues (from pretending to be horrified by them when done under Bush to tolerating them or even supporting them when done by Obama) is precisely because it’s so remarkable to see these authoritarian follower traits manifest so vibrantly in the very same political movement — sophisticated, independent-minded, reality-based progressives — that believes it is above that, and that only primitive conservatives are plagued by such follower-mindlessness.

The Democratic Party owes a sincere apology to George Bush, Dick Cheney and company for enthusiastically embracing many of the very Terrorism policies which caused them to hurl such vehement invective at the GOP for all those years. And progressives who support the views of the majority as expressed by this poll should never be listened to again the next time they want to pretend to oppose civilian slaughter and civil liberties assaults when perpetrated by the next Republican President (it should be noted that roughly 35% of liberals, a non-trivial amount, say they oppose these Obama policies).

One final point: I’ve often made the case that one of the most consequential aspects of the Obama legacy is that he has transformed what was once known as “right-wing shredding of the Constitution” into bipartisan consensus, and this is exactly what I mean. When one of the two major parties supports a certain policy and the other party pretends to oppose it — as happened with these radical War on Terror policies during the Bush years — then public opinion is divisive on the question, sharply split. But once the policy becomes the hallmark of both political parties, then public opinion becomes robust in support of it. That’s because people assume that if both political parties support a certain policy that it must be wise, and because policies that enjoy the status of bipartisan consensus are removed from the realm of mainstream challenge. That’s what Barack Obama has done to these Bush/Cheney policies: he has, as Jack Goldsmith predicted he would back in 2009, shielded and entrenched them as standard U.S. policy for at least a generation, and (by leading his supporters to embrace these policies as their own) has done so with far more success than any GOP President ever could have dreamed of achieving. (Exactly as they planned it when Obama became "their guy."--jef)

UPDATE: The Advocacy Center for Equality and Democracy documents how much public opinion has changed on these issues under (and as a result of) the Obama presidency: “under the leadership of a President who campaigned with the promise to close the facility, . . . support for the detention center may be at its highest level ever.”

The National Defense Authorization Act Explained

The Indefinite Detention of American Citizens
by JOANNE MARINER

Passed by the House and Senate last week, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) now awaits the president’s signature. Because of its controversial provisions on indefinite detention, President Obama had threatened to veto the bill back in May, when the House passed one version of it, and again in November, when the Senate passed another, somewhat different version of it.

But last week, after the House and Senate reconciled their two versions of the bill, the president lifted his veto threat. His press secretary explained in a written statement that the revised bill was considered acceptable because problematic provisions had been removed, and because “the most recent changes give the President additional discretion in determining how the law will be implemented, consistent with our values and the rule of law.”

Numerous human rights advocates, civil libertarians, and members of Congress disagree. Human Rights Watch said that President Obama’s decision not to veto the bill “does enormous damage to the rule of law both in the US and abroad.” The ACLU said, “if President Obama signs this bill, it will damage both his legacy and American’s reputation for upholding the rule of law.” Representative Jerrold Nadler, who voted against the bill, said that it presents a “momentous challenge to one of the founding principles of the United States—that no person may be deprived of his liberty without due process of law.”

The bill’s congressional supporters reacted with outrage to such criticism, calling it false and misleading. “Rarely in my time have I seen legislation so consistently misunderstood and misrepresented as these detainee provisions,” complained Senator John McCain, one of the bill’s main drafters.

So what do the detention provisions of the NDAA actually say, and who, in particular, do they affect?

Background to the NDAA

To fully understand the NDAA’s provisions on detention, a brief review of recent history is needed.

During the Bush years, despite massive public and press attention to the administration’s detention policies, Congress remained largely out of the picture. While the USA PATRIOT Act contained some provisions on detention, they were never put to use; the Bush administration preferred to create a detention system that was, it assumed, largely free of legal constraints and judicial oversight.

The military prison at Guantanamo and the CIA’s secret prison system were therefore created by executive fiat, without congressional input or restriction. When cases challenging Guantanamo and the military detention of US citizens on US soil got to court, however, the administration claimed that the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), a joint resolution passed by Congress in September 2001, gave congressional approval for those detentions.

The AUMF, which authorizes the president to use “necessary and appropriate force” against those whom he determined “planned, authorized, committed or aided” the September 11 attacks, or who harbored such persons or groups, is silent on the issue of detention. A plurality of the US Supreme Court agreed with the administration, nonetheless, that the power to detain is necessarily implied by the power to use military force.

Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, the 2004 ruling that upheld the US government’s detention power, left many questions unanswered. Because it involved a prisoner who was captured during the armed conflict in Afghanistan, it did not raise the Bush administration’s broad claims of a “global war on terror,” in which terrorism suspects far from any battlefield were treated like enemy soldiers. It did not even give much guidance regarding the scope of the armed conflict, geographic or temporal, although it included, in dicta, a skeptical reference to the administration’s broadest claims.

Congress maintained its hands-off approach to detention during the entirety of President Bush’s two terms in office, even as it legislated on closely related issues like minimum standards of humane treatment and the rules for military commission proceedings. When Obama took office in January 2009, however, Congress’s attitude changed. Many members of Congress reacted negatively to Obama’s stated goal of closing Guantanamo, and, since that time, Congress has imposed various ever tighter restrictions on the release and transfer of detainees.

One last historical fact that is important to remember, when considering the scope of the NDAA, is that the Bush administration held two American citizens in indefinite military detention, Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla. While Hamdi was picked up as a combatant in Afghanistan in 2002, Padilla was arrested in a civilian setting in Chicago that same year.

The Padilla case was never definitively adjudicated—Padilla was finally moved to the civilian justice system in 2006 — but it underscores the Bush administration’s claim of power to hold even American citizens picked up in the United States indefinitely without trial.

Subtitle D of the NDAA

What is now known as Subtitle D of the NDAA—the section on detention—made its first appearance in March of this year. Called the Detainee Security Act in the House, and the Military Detainee Procedures Improvement Act in the Senate, the bills, introduced by Representative Buck McKeon and Senator John McCain, respectively, were meant to shift counterterrorism responsibilities from law enforcement to the military. The clear goal of the two bills was to require that suspected terrorists either be tried before military commissions or be held in indefinite detention without charge.

By May, the House version of the bill had been added to the NDAA, a $662 billion spending bill that finances the military’s annual operations. It passed by a vote of 322-96, even as President Obama issued a veto "threat," complaining that the bill improperly limited the government’s ability to fight terrorism effectively.

The Senate version of the bill, which also became part of the NDAA, passed in November on an overwhelming 93-7 vote. Prior to the Senate’s passage of the bill, nearly every government official with responsibility over counterterrorism, from FBI head Robert Mueller to CIA director David Petraeus, had voiced concerns that the bill would have a negative impact on US counterterrorism efforts.

President Obama again issued a veto threat after the Senate vote, but as soon as the bill was modified slightly during the process of reconciling its House and Senate versions, the threat was dropped. The final version of the bill passed both houses of Congress last week with large majorities.

Substance and Procedure in the NDAA

Subtitle D of the NDAA consists of twelve sections, covering issues that range from the military’s power over detention to technical amendments to the Military Commissions Act of 2009. Overall, the thrust of its provisions is to create a presumption of military jurisdiction over terrorism suspects, expand post-hoc congressional scrutiny of decisions over the detention and prosecution of such suspects, and effectively prevent Guantanamo from being closed.

Rather than establishing categorical rules to achieve these ends, however, the bill mostly relies on an array of procedural techniques like reporting, briefing and certification requirements. The substantive rules that it does establish are, in large part, qualified by waiver options and other potential loopholes.

Nonetheless, nearly every provision in subtitle D is objectionable from the standpoint of human rights and civil liberties. Among the controversial provisions are sections 1026, 1027 and 1028 of the bill, which restrict detainee transfers and releases from Guantanamo. But while human rights organizations are worried about these limitations, their gravest concerns pertain to sections 1021 and 1022.

Sections 1021 and 1022

It is sections 1021 and 1022 that human rights organizations have in mind when they say that the NDAA enshrines indefinite detention without charge into US law.

Section 1021 purports to “affirm” the military’s authority to hold people in indefinite detention without charge pursuant to the AUMF. Although the original House version of the bill would have stated explicitly that the US continues to be in an armed conflict with Al Qaeda, the Taliban and associated groups, the final version of the bill is somewhat more circumspect.

Section 1022 takes a subset of the persons possibly subject to military detention under section 1021—focusing essentially on persons with a stronger connection to terrorism—and creates a presumption that they will be held in military detention.

The bad news is that, as passed, sections 1021 and 1022 represent clear congressional approval of what, up to now, has been solely the executive branch’s decision to hold people in indefinite detention without charge. (Remember that the AUMF itself was silent on detention questions.) Giving the practice a firm and explicit statutory grounding not only makes it less vulnerable to legal challenge, it may well make the practice more permanent.

The good news, to the extent there is any, is that neither section 1021 nor section 1022 defines the “war” or the “hostilities” at issue. They do not, in other words, explicitly embrace the “global war on terror” paradigm that equates terrorism with armed conflict and suspected terrorists with enemy soldiers. By failing to address that question, they leave open the theoretical (if unlikely) possibility that a court could give the statute a narrow reading consistent with international law understandings of armed conflict.

Yet even this qualified success should be further qualified. First, some of the people explicitly covered by section 1021—who, for example, harbored persons responsible for the September 11 attacks—might have no meaningful link to armed conflict. More importantly, the focus of section 1022 is clearly terrorism, not armed conflict: it covers Al Qaeda members and members of groups that act in coordination with or under the direction of Al Qaeda. Although the people subject to presumptive military detention under section 1022 are supposed to be a subset of the larger group of people covered by section 1021, which includes a requirement of a nexus to armed conflict under its subsection (b)(2), the thrust of the provision is still to equate armed conflict with terrorism.

Finally, it should also be noted that the set of “covered persons” subject to possible military detention, as defined in section 1021(b) of the NDAA, is far broader than the set of persons mentioned in the AUMF. While section 1021(b)(1) relies on the wording of the AUMF, section 1021(b)(2), which defines an additional category of potential detainees, is based on the Obama administration’s definition of “unprivileged enemy belligerent” (which, itself, is just a slight tweaking of the Bush administration’s definition of “unlawful enemy combatant”).

This provision covers not only persons who are members of Al Qaeda, the Taliban and associated forces (all broad and possibly inchoate categories in themselves), but also persons who “substantially supported” those groups. The concept of “substantial support” is potentially quite broad (what kind of support is covered, and might opinion or expression count?). Also, support is an extremely controversial basis for law of war detention, even in traditional wars, and the issue has sparked enormous litigation at Guantanamo.

The Indefinite Detention of American Citizens

In my next column, I will address the most vexed and contested question about the scope of the NDAA’s detention provisions: the extent to which they authorize the detention of American citizens, including citizens picked up in the United States.

For the moment, I’ll just note some recent remarks of one of the NDAA’s key drafters. In applauding the bill’s passage last week, Senator McCain spoke of its “strong, unambiguous language that recognizes that the war on terror extends to us at home.”

George W. Obama? The Bush-Obama Presidency

The Saved and the Sacked
By DAVID BROMWICH

Is it too soon to speak of the Bush-Obama presidency?

The record shows impressive continuities between the two administrations, and nowhere more than in the policy of "force projection" in the Arab world. With one war half-ended in Iraq, but another doubled in size and stretching across borders in Afghanistan; with an expanded program of drone killings and black-ops assassinations, the latter glorified in special ceremonies of thanksgiving (as they never were under Bush); with the number of prisoners at Guantanamo having decreased, but some now slated for permanent detention; with the repeated invocation of "state secrets" to protect the government from charges of war crimes; with the Patriot Act renewed and its most dubious provisions left intact -- the Bush-Obama presidency has sufficient self-coherence to be considered a historical entity with a life of its own.

The significance of this development has been veiled in recent mainstream coverage of the national security state and our larger and smaller wars. Back in 2005-2006, when the Iraqi insurgency refused to die down and what had been presented as "sectarian feuding" began to look like a war of national liberation against an occupying power, the American press exhibited an uncommon critical acuteness. But Washington's embrace of "the surge" in Iraq in 2007 took that war off the front page, and it -- along with the Afghan War -- has returned only occasionally in the four years since.

This disappearance suited the purposes of the long double-presidency. Keep the wars going but normalize them; make them normal by not talking about them much; by not talking about them imply that, while "victory" is not in sight, there is something else, an achievement more realistic and perhaps more grown-up, still available to the United States in the Greater Middle East. This other thing is never defined but has lately been given a name. They call it "success."

Meanwhile, back at home...

The usual turn from unsatisfying wars abroad to happier domestic conditions, however, no longer seems tenable. In these August days, Americans are rubbing their eyes, still wondering what has befallen us with the president's "debt deal" -- a shifting of tectonic plates beneath the economy of a sort Dick Cheney might have dreamed of, but which Barack Obama and the House Republicans together brought to fruition. A redistribution of wealth and power more than three decades in the making has now been carved into the system and given the stamp of permanence.

Only a Democratic president, and only one associated in the public mind (however wrongly) with the fortunes of the poor, could have accomplished such a reversal with such sickening completeness.

One of the last good times that President Obama enjoyed before the frenzy of debt negotiations began was a chuckle he shared with Jeff Immelt, former CEO of General Electric and now head of the president's outside panel of economic advisers. At a June 13th meeting of the president's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, a questioner said he assumed that President Obama knew about the difficulties caused by the drawn-out process of securing permits for construction jobs. Obama leaned into the microphone and offered a breezy ad-lib: "Shovel ready wasn't as, uh, shovel-ready as we expected" -- and Immelt got off a hearty laugh. An unguarded moment: the president of "hope and change" signifying his solidarity with the big managers whose worldly irony he had adopted.

A certain mystery surrounds Obama's perpetuation of Bush's economic policies, in the absence of the reactionary class loyalty that accompanied them, and his expansion of Bush's war policies in the absence of the crude idea of the enemy and the spirited love of war that drove Bush. But the puzzle has grown tiresome, and the effects of the continuity matter more than its sources.

We knew the meaning of Bush, and the need for resistance was clear. Obama makes resistance harder. During a deep crisis, such a nominal leader, by his contradictory words and conduct and the force of his example (or rather the lack of force in his example), becomes a subtle disaster for all those whose hopes once rested with him.

The philosopher William James took as a motto for practical morality: "By their fruits shall ye know them, not by their roots."

Suppose we test the last two and a half years by the same sensible criterion. Translated into the language of presidential power -- the power of a president whose method was to field a "team of rivals" and "lead from behind" -- the motto must mean: by their appointments shall ye know them.

Let us examine Obama, then, by the standard of his cabinet members, advisers, and favored influences, and group them by the answers to two questions: Whom has he wanted to stay on longest, in order to profit from their solidity and bask in their influence? Which of them has he discarded fastest or been most eager to shed his association with? Think of them as the saved and the sacked. Obama's taste in associates at these extremes may tell us something about the moral and political personality in the middle.

The Saved

Advisers whom the president entrusted with power beyond expectation, and sought to keep in his administration for as long as he could prevail on them to stay:

1. Lawrence Summers: Obama's chief economic adviser, 2009-2010. As Bill Clinton's secretary of the treasury, 1999-2001, Summers arranged the repeal of the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act, which had separated the commercial banks -- holders of the savings of ordinary people -- from the speculative action of the brokerage houses and money firms. The aim of Glass-Steagall was to protect citizens and the economy from a financial bubble and collapse. Demolition of that wall between savings and finance was a large cause of the 2008 meltdown. In the late 1990s, Summers had also pressed for the deregulation of complex derivatives -- a dream fully realized under Bush. In the first years of the Obama era, with the ear of the president, he commandeered the bank bailouts and advised against major programs for job creation. He won, and we are living with the results.

In 2009-2010, the critical accessory to Summers's power was Timothy Geithner, Obama's treasury secretary. Most likely, Geithner was picked for his position by the combined recommendations of Summers and Bush's Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. The latter once described Geithner as "a very unusually talented young man," and worked with him closely in 2008 when he was still president of the New York Fed. At that time, he concurred with Paulson on the wisdom of bailing out the insurance giant AIG and not rescuing Lehman Brothers. Obama for his part initiated several phone consultations with Paulson during the 2008 campaign -- often holding his plane on the tarmac to talk and listen. This chain is unbroken. Any tremors in the president's closed world caused by Summers's early departure from the administration have undoubtedly been offset by Geithner's recent reassurance that he will stay at the Treasury beyond 2011.

Postscript: In 2011, Summers has become more reformist than Obama. On The Charlie Rose Show on July 13th, he criticized the president's dilatoriness in mounting a program to create jobs. Thus he urged the partial abandonment of his own policy, which Obama continues to defend.

2. Robert Gates: A member of the permanent establishment in Washington, Gates raised to the third power the distinction of massive continuity: First as CIA director under George H.W. Bush, second as secretary of defense under George W. Bush, and third as Obama's secretary of defense. He remained for 28 months and departed against the wishes of the president. Gates sided with General David Petraeus and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen in 2009 to promote a massive (called "moderate") escalation of the Afghan War; yet he did so without rancor or posturing -- a style Obama trusted and in the company of which he did not mind losing. In the Bush years, Gates was certainly a moderate in relation to the extravagant war aims of Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and their neoconservative circle. He worked to strengthen U.S. militarism through an ethic of bureaucratic normalization.

His approach has been endorsed and will be continued -- though probably with less canniness -- by his successor Leon Panetta. Without a career in security to fortify his confidence, Panetta is really a member of a different species: the adaptable choice for "running things" -- without regard to the nature of the thing or the competence required. Best known as the chief of staff who reduced to a semblance of order the confusion of the Clinton White House, he is associated in the public mind with no set of views or policies.

3. Rahm Emanuel: As Obama's White House chief of staff, Emanuel performed much of the hands-on work of legislative bargaining that President Obama himself preferred not to engage in. (Vice President Joe Biden also regularly took on this role.) He thereby incurred a cheerless gratitude, but he is a man willing to be disliked. Obama seems to have held Emanuel's ability in awe; and such was his power that nothing but the chance of becoming mayor of Chicago would have plucked him from the White House. Emanuel is credited, rightly or not, with the Democratic congressional victory of 2006, and one fact about that success, which was never hidden, has been too quickly forgotten. Rahm Emanuel took pains to weed out anti-war candidates.

Obama would have known this, and admired the man who carried it off. Whether Emanuel pursued a similar strategy in the 2010 midterm elections has never been seriously discussed. The fact that the category "anti-war Democrat" hardly exists in 2011 is, however, an achievement jointly creditable to Emanuel and the president.

4. Cass Sunstein: Widely thought to be the president's most powerful legal adviser. Sunstein defended and may have advised Obama on his breach of his 2008 promise (as senator) to filibuster any new law that awarded amnesty to the telecoms that illegally spied on Americans. This was Obama's first major reversal in the 2008 presidential campaign: he had previously defended the integrity of the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act against the secret encroachment of the National Security Agency (NSA).

At that moment, Obama changed from an accuser to a conditional apologist for the surveillance of Americans: the secret policy advocated by Dick Cheney, approved by President Bush, executed by NSA Director Michael Hayden, and supplied with a rationale by Cheney's legal counsel David Addington. In his awkward public defense of the switch, Obama suggested that scrutiny of telecom records and their uses by the inspectors general in the relevant agencies and departments should be enough to restore the rule of law.

When it comes to national security policy, Sunstein is a particularly strong example of Bush-Obama continuity. Though sometimes identified as a liberal, from early on he defended the expansion of the national security state under Cheney's Office of the Vice President, and he praised the firm restraint with which the Ashcroft Justice Department shouldered its responsibilities. "By historical standards," he wrote in the fall of 2004, "the Bush administration has acted with considerable restraint and with commendable respect for political liberty. It has not attempted to restrict speech or the democratic process in any way. The much-reviled and poorly understood Patriot Act, at least as administered, has done little to restrict civil liberty as it stood before its enactment." This seems to have become Obama's view.

Charity toward the framers of the Patriot Act has, in the Obama administration, been accompanied by a consistent refusal to initiate or support legal action against the "torture lawyers." Sunstein described the Bush Justice Department memos by John Yoo and Jay Bybee, which defended the use of the water torture and other extreme methods, in words that stopped short of legal condemnation: "It's egregiously bad. It's very low level, it's very weak, embarrassingly weak, just short of reckless." Bad lawyering: a professional fault but not an actionable offense.

The Obama policy of declining to hold any high official or even CIA interrogators accountable for violations of the law by the preceding administration would likely not have survived opposition by Sunstein. A promise not to prosecute, however, has been implicit in the findings by the Obama Justice Department -- a promise that was made explicit by Leon Panetta in February 2009 when he had just been named President Obama's new director of the CIA.

As head of the president's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, with an office in the White House, Sunstein adjudicates government policy on issues of worker and consumer safety; yet his title suggests a claim of authority on issues such as the data-mining of information about American citizens and the government's deployment of a state secrets privilege. He deserves wider attention, too, for his 2008 proposal that the government "cognitively infiltrate" discussion groups on-line and in neighborhoods, paying covert agents to monitor and, if possible, discredit lines of argument which the government judges to be extreme or misleading.

5. Eric Holder: Holder once said that the trial of suspected 9/11 "mastermind" Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a New York City courtroom would be "the defining event of my time as attorney general." The decision to make KSM's a civilian trial was, however, scuttled, thanks to incompetent management at the White House: neither the first nor last failure of its kind. The policy of trying suspected terrorists in civilian courts seems to have suffered from never being wholeheartedly embraced by the administration's inside actors. Local resistance by the New York authorities was the ostensible reason for the failure and the change of venue back to a military tribunal at Guantanamo. No member of the administration besides Holder has been observed to show much regret.

During his 30-month tenure, in keeping with Obama's willingness to overlook the unpleasant history of CIA renditions and "extreme interrogations," Holder has made no move to prosecute any upper-level official of any of the big banks and money firms responsible for the financial collapse of 2008. His silence on the subject has been taken as a signal that such prosecutions will never occur. To judge by public statements, the energies of the attorney general, in an administration that arrived under the banner of bringing "sunshine" and "transparency" to Washington, have mainly been dedicated to the prosecution of government whistle-blowers through a uniquely rigorous application of the Espionage Act of 1917. More people have been accused under that law by this attorney general than in the entire preceding 93 years of the law's existence.

Again, this is a focus that Bush-era attorney generals John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, and Michael Mukasey might have relished, but on which none would have dared to act on so boldly. Extraordinary delays in grand jury proceedings on Army Private Bradley Manning, suspected of providing government secrets to WikiLeaks, and Julian Assange, who ran that website, are said to have come from a protracted attempt to secure a legal hold against one or both potential defendants within the limits of a barbarous and almost dormant law.

6. Dennis Ross: Earlier in his career, Obama seems to have cherished an interest in the creation of an independent Palestinian state. In Chicago, he was a friend of the dissident Middle East scholar Rashid Khalidi; during his 2007 primary campaign, he sought and received advice from Robert Malley, former special assistant to President Clinton for Arab-Israeli affairs, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter. Both were "realist" opponents of the expansionist policy of Israel's right-wing coalition government, which subsidizes and affords military protection to Jewish settlements on the occupied West Bank.

Under pressure from the Israel lobby, however, Obama dissociated himself from all three chosen advisers.

Ross, as surely as Gates, is a member of Washington's permanent establishment. Recruited for the Carter Defense Department by Paul Wolfowitz, he started out as a Soviet specialist, but his expertise migrated with a commission to undertake a Limited Contingency Study on the need for American defense of the Persian Gulf. An American negotiator at the 2000 Camp David summit, Ross was accused of being an unfair broker, having always "started from the Israeli bottom line."

He entered the Obama administration as a special adviser to Hillary Clinton on the Persian Gulf, but was moved into the White House on June 25, 2009, and outfitted with an elaborate title and comprehensive duties: Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for the Central Region, including all of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, Pakistan and South Asia. Ross has cautioned Obama to be "sensitive" to domestic Israeli concerns.

In retrospect, his installation in the White House looks like the first step in a pattern of concessions to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that undid Obama's hopes for an agreement in the region. Here, caution precluded all inventiveness. It could have been predicted that the ascendancy of Ross would render void the two-state solution Obama anticipated in his carefully prepared and broadly advertised speech to the Arab world from Cairo University in June 2009.

7. Peter Orzag: Director of the Office of Management and Budget from January 2009 to August 2010, Orzag was charged with bringing in the big health insurers to lay out what it would take for them to support the president's health-care law. In this way, Orzag -- along with the companies -- exerted a decisive influence on the final shape of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. In January 2011, he left the administration to become vice chairman of global banking at Citigroup. A few days out of the White House, he published an op-ed in the New York Times advising the president to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for the top 2% of Americans -- adding that Obama should indicate that the cuts would continue in force only through 2012. Obama took the advice.

8. Thomas Donilon: National Security Adviser and (after the departure of Gates) Obama's closest consultant on foreign policy. Donilon supported the 34,000 troop-escalation order that followed the president's inconclusive 2009 Afghanistan War review. He encouraged and warmly applauded Obama's non-binding "final orders" on Afghanistan, which all the participants in the 2009 review were asked formally to approve. (The final orders speak of "a prioritized comprehensive approach" by which the U.S. will "work with [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai when we can" to set "the conditions for an accelerated transition," to bring about "effective sub-national governance," and to "transfer" the responsibility for fighting the war while continuing to "degrade" enemy forces.)

Donilon comes from the worlds of business, the law, and government in about equal measure: a versatile career spanning many orthodoxies. His open and unreserved admiration for President Obama seems to have counted more heavily in his appointment than the low opinion of his qualifications apparently held by several associates. As Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs during the Clinton administration, he helped arrange the eastward expansion of NATO after the Cold War: perhaps the most pointless and destructive bipartisan project of the epoch. He was Executive Vice President for Law and Policy at Fannie Mae, 1999-2005.

The Sacked

Advisers and nominees with views that were in line with Obama's 2008 election campaign or his professed goals in 2009, but who have since been fired, asked to resign or step down, or seen their nominations dropped:

1. General James Jones: Former Marine Corps Commandant and a skeptic of the Afghanistan escalation, Jones became the president's first National Security Adviser. He was, however, often denied meetings with Obama, who seems to have looked on Gates as a superior technocrat, Petraeus as a more prestigious officer, and Donilon as a more fervent believer in the split-the-difference war and diplomatic policies Obama elected to pursue. Jones resigned in October 2010, under pressure.

A curious point: Obama had spoken to Jones only twice before appointing him to so high a post and seems hardly to have come to know him by the time he resigned.

2. Karl Eikenberry: Commander of Combined Forces in Afghanistan before he was made ambassador, Eikenberry, a retired Lieutenant General, had seniority over both Petraeus and then war commander General Stanley McChrystal when it came to experience in that country and theater of war. He was the author of cables to the State Department in late 2009, which carried a stinging rebuke to the conduct of the war and unconcealed hostility toward any new policy of escalation. The Eikenberry cables were drafted in order to influence the White House review that fall; they advised that the Afghan war was in the process of being lost, that it could never be won, and that nothing good would come from an increased commitment of U.S. troops.

Petraeus, then Centcom commander, and McChrystal were both disturbed by the cables -- startled when they arrived unbidden and intimidated by their authority. Obama, astonishingly, chose to ignore them. This may be the single most baffling occasion of the many when fate dealt a winning card to the president and yet he folded. Among other such occasions: the 2008-2009 bank bailouts and the opening for financial regulation; the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the opportunity for a revised environmental policy; the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdowns and a revised policy toward nuclear energy; the Goldstone Report and the chance for an end to the Gaza blockade. But of all these as well as other cases that might be mentioned, the Eikenberry cables offer the clearest instance of persisting in a discredited policy against the weight of impressive evidence.

Ambassador Eikenberry retired in 2011, and Obama replaced him with Ryan Crocker, the Foreign Service officer brought into Iraq by Bush to help General Petraeus manage the details and publicity around the Iraq surge of 2007-2008.

3. Paul Volcker: Head of the Federal Reserve under Presidents Carter and Reagan, Volker had a record (not necessarily common among upper-echelon workers in finance) entirely free of the reproach of venality. A steady adviser to the 2008 Obama campaign, he lent gravity to the young candidate's professions of competence in financial matters. He also counseled Obama against the one-sidedness of a recovery policy founded on repayment guarantees to financial outfits such as Citigroup and Bank of America: the policy, that is, favored by Summers and Geithner in preference to massive job creation and a major investment in infrastructure. "If you want to be a bank," he said, "follow the bank rules. If Goldman Sachs and the others want to do proprietary trading, then they shouldn't be banks." His advice -- to tighten regulation in order to curb speculative trading -- was adopted late and in diluted form. In January 2010, Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric, which paid no federal taxes that year, replaced him.

4. Dennis Blair: As Director of National Intelligence, Blair sought to limit the expansion of covert operations by the CIA. In this quest he was defeated by CIA Director Leon Panetta -- a seasoned infighter, though without any experience in intelligence, who successfully enlarged the Agency's prerogatives and limited oversight of its activities during his tenure. Blair refused to resign when Obama asked him to, and demanded to be fired. He finally stepped down on May 21, 2010.

Doubtless Blair hurt his prospects irreparably by making clear to the president his skepticism regarding the usefulness of drone warfare: a form of killing Obama favors as the most politic and antiseptic available to the U.S. Since being sacked, Blair has come out publicly against the broad use of drones in Pakistan and elsewhere.

On his way out, he was retrospectively made a scapegoat for the November 2009 Fort Hood, Texas, killing spree by Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan; for the "underwear" bomber's attempt to blow up a plane on its way to Detroit on Christmas day 2009; and for the failed Times Square car bombing of May 2010 -- all attacks (it was implied) that Blair should have found the missing key to avert, even though the Army, the FBI, and the CIA were unable to do so.

5. James Cartwright: As vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Cartwright passed on to Obama, and interpreted for him, a good deal of information that proved useful in the Afghanistan War review. Their friendship outlasted the process and he came to be known as Obama's "favorite general," but Cartwright stirred the resentment from both Petraeus and Mullen for establishing a separate channel of influence with the president. Like Eikenberry, he had been a skeptic on the question of further escalation in Afghanistan. His name was floated by the White House as the front-runner to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs after the retirement of Mullen. Informed of the military opposition to the appointment, Obama reversed field and chose Army Chief of Staff General Martin Dempsey, a figure more agreeable to Petraeus and Mullen.

6. Dawn Johnsen: Obama's first choice to head the Office of Legal Council, a choice generally praised and closely watched by constitutional lawyers and civil libertarians. Her name was withdrawn after a 14-month wait, and she was denied a confirmation process. The cause: Republican objections to her writings and her public statements against the practice of torture and legal justifications for torture.

This reversal falls in with a larger pattern: the putting forward of candidates for government positions whose views are straightforward, publicly available, and consistent with the pre-2009 principles of Barack Obama -- followed by Obama's withdrawal of support for the same candidates. A more recent instance was the naming (after considerable delay) of Elizabeth Warren as a special advisor to organize the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, followed by the decision in July not to nominate her as the first director of the bureau.

Avoidance of a drag-out fight in confirmation hearings repeatedly seems to be the recurrent motive here. Of course, the advantage of such a fight, given an articulate and willing nominee, is the education of public opinion. But in every possible instance, President Obama has been averse to any public engagement in the clash of ideas. "Bottom line is that it was going to be close," a Senate Democratic source told ABC's Jake Tapper when Johnsen's name was withdrawn. "If they wanted to, the White House could have pushed for a vote. But they didn't want to 'cause they didn't have the stomach for the debate."

Where the nomination of an "extreme" candidate might have hardened the impression of Obama as an extremist, might not a public hearing have helped eradicate the very preconception that a frightened withdrawal tends to confirm? This question is not asked.

7. Greg Craig: For two years special counsel in the Clinton White House, he led the team defending the president in the impeachment proceedings in Congress. Craig's declaration of support for Obama in March 2007 was vital to the insurgent candidate, because of his well-known loyalty to the Clintons. Obama made him White House Counsel, and his initial task was to draw up plans for the closing of Guantanamo, a promise made by the president on his first day in the Oval Office. But once the paper was signed, Obama showed little interest in the developing plans. Others were more passionate. Dick Cheney worked on a susceptible populace to resurrect old fears. The forces against closure rallied and spread panic, while the president said nothing. Craig was defeated inside the White House by the "realist" Rahm Emanuel, and sacked.

8. Carol Browner: A leading environmentalist in the Clinton administration, Browner was given a second shot by Obama as director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy. She found her efforts thwarted within the administration as well as in Congress: in mid-2010 Obama decided that -- as a way to deal with global warming -- cap-and-trade legislation was a loser for the midterm elections. Pressure on Obama from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to heed business interests served as a strong incitement in forcing Browner's resignation after the democratic "shellacking" in midterm elections, a result that his quiet abandonment of cap-and-trade had failed to prevent. The White House had no backup plan for addressing the disaster of global warming. After Browner's resignation in March 2011, her position was abolished. Since then, Obama has seldom spoken of global warming or climate change.

Moral and Political Limbo

The Obama presidency has been characterized by a refined sense of impossibility. A kind of suffocation sets in when a man of power floats carefully clear of all unorthodox stimuli and resorts to official comforters of the sort exemplified by Panetta. As the above partial list of the saved and the sacked shows, the president lives now in a world in which he is certain never to be told he is wrong when he happens to be on the wrong track. It is a world where the unconventionality of an opinion, or the existence of a possible majority against it somewhere, counts as prima facie evidence against its soundness.

So alternative ideas vanish -- along with the people who represent them. What, then, does President Obama imagine he is doing as he backs into one weak appointment after another, and purges all signs of thought and independence around him? We have a few dim clues.

A popular book on Abraham Lincoln, Team of Rivals, seems to have prompted Obama to suppose that Lincoln himself "led from behind" and was committed to bipartisanship not only as a tactic but as an always necessary means to the highest good of democracy. A more wishful conceit was never conceived; but Obama has talked of the book easily and often to support a "pragmatic" instinct for constant compromise that he believes himself to share with the American people and with Lincoln.

A larger hint may come from Obama's recently released National Strategy for Counterterrorism, where a sentence in the president's own voice asserts: "We face the world as it is, but we will also pursue a strategy for the world we seek." If the words "I face the world as it is" have a familiar sound, the reason is that they received a trial run in Obama's 2009 Nobel Prize speech. Those words were the bridge across which an ambivalent peacemaker walked to confront the heritage of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King with the realities of power as experienced by the leader of the only superpower in the world.

Indeed, Obama's understanding of international morality seems to be largely expressed by the proposition that "there's serious evil in the world" -- a truth he confided in 2007 to the New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks, and attributed to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr -- combined with the assertion that he is ready to "face the world as it is." The world we seek is, of course, the better world of high morality. But morality, properly understood, is nothing but a framework for ideals. Once you have discharged your duty, by saying the right words for the right policies, you have to accommodate the world.


This has become the ethic of the Bush-Obama administration in a new phase. It explains, as nothing else does, Obama's enormous appetite for compromise, the growing conventionality of his choices of policy and person, and the legitimacy he has conferred on many radical innovations of the early Bush years by assenting to their logic and often widening their scope. They are, after all, the world as it is.

Obama's pragmatism comes down to a series of maxims that can be relied on to ratify the existing order -- any order, however recent its advent and however repulsive its effects. You must stay in power in order to go on "seeking." Therefore, in "the world as it is," you must requite evil with lesser evil. You do so to prevent your replacement by fanatics: people, for example, like those who invented the means you began by deploring but ended up adopting. Their difference from you is that they lack the vision of the seeker. Finally, in the world as it is, to retain your hold on power you must keep in place the sort of people who are normally found in places of power.

US Knew Where Osama Was Since 2005

Cross and Double Cross With Gitmo Files
By ISRAEL SHAMIR

The unredacted Guantanamo files show clearly  that the trail to Abbottabad was known to the US intelligence services at least since 2005, when al-Libi, another Abbottabad dweller, was captured.

Timing is everything. The US President announced killing of Osama bin Laden just as Wikileaks completed its publication of Guantanamo files. Was it coincidence? If not, what was the connection? 

An answer to this question is directly connected with the cross and double cross accusations exchanged in the murky world where the intelligence services meet mainstream media. 

Publication of the US secret papers, the Guantanamo Files, was done almost simultaneously by two competing media groups.

• One was the Wikileaks of Julian Assange and their partners The Washington Post, The Daily Telegraph, the French Le Monde.
  
  
• Another one was The New York Times, The Guardian, the Israeli Haaretz.
  

The Guardian said of the files: “They were obtained by the New York Times, who shared them with the Guardian, which is publishing extracts today, having redacted information which might identify informants. The New York Times says the files were made available to it not by Wikileaks, but "by another source on the condition of anonymity". 

Ha'aretz made more of it: “A few media outlets, including The New York Times, the Guardian and Haaretz, obtained the documents from an independent source without the help of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is under house arrest in Britain awaiting his appeal not to be extradited to Sweden, where he faces charges of rape and sexual assault.” The Guardian’s David Leigh twitted “double-crossing Assange!”

Now we’ll give you the story behind the story: who crossed and double crossed whom, which information was redacted and how did it lead to OBL? 

In the beginning, the source was one; allegedly Private First Class Manning or whoever it was who got it and transferred to the Wikileaks of Julian Assange. The entire file is still far from being published – a big part of it was encrypted and uploaded as Julian Assange’s Insurance file. Assange published two tranches of that: the War Diary: Afghanistan War Logs and War Diary: Iraq War Logs. He prepared publication of the third tranche: a huge collection of the State Department cables (Cablegate: 250,000 US Embassy Diplomatic Cables) in the Guardian.

At that point, the data river forked. The treasure trove was copied by a Wikileaks German employee, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who went AWOL after this profitable appropriation.

Domscheit-Berg made a deal with David Leigh of the Guardian; Leigh used it to cross Assange. He cold-shouldered Assange, declared the deal ‘void’, and used the data to promote his career and to make friends with Bill Keller, editor of the NY Times They published the cables after redacting them, or should we say “censoring” –  removing everything the secret services demanded to remove. We wrote about it at length here in CounterPunch.

Julian Assange succeeded in regaining some lost ground: he established new partnerships, with the Daily Telegraph and others. The cables were being published all the time. And then Assange learned that the Guardian and the New York Times planned to publish the Guantanamo files. There was no time to lose: in a few days, the Wikileaks team prepared the files and began to upload. So did the competitors, possessing the Domscheit-Berg appropriated copy. This was the double-cross per Leigh.

The Guardian and the New York Times have a big and skillful staff, a lot of research, rich archives. But they decided to play ball with the secret services of their countries, redacting information which might identify informants. What a hutzpah! Sometimes, the identity of “informants” is more important than the information.

For instance in the file of Adil Hadi al Jaz’iri Leigh and Keller removed the name of the informant

To their misfortune and to our advantage, at this time the Wikileaks and the Guardian/NY Times were not a loving couple but two competing enterprises. And the Wikileaks published this file in full, warts and all. 

Here is the name in full:

Abu Zubaydah the informer was the subject of intensive research, available here that makes clear: this unfortunate man was tortured by the CIA, with permission of  US medics and Bush administration, to the point of the total collapse of his personality. He was one of the High Value Detainees; all of them suffered tortures beyond our ability to comprehend. Information they provided was not only unacceptable in court, it was of nil value because they said everything their tormentors wanted in order to gain a moment of peace. 

Andy Worthington wrote: Since then, more and more compelling evidence has emerged to demonstrate that Abu Zubaydah was indeed nothing more than a “safehouse keeper” with mental health problems, who “claimed to know more about al-Qaeda and its inner workings than he really did”… “The United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.” Further confirmation was also provided that his torture yielded no significant information and led only to vast amounts of the intelligence agencies’ time being wasted on false leads. A year ago, summing up the results of Zubaydah’s torture, a former intelligence official stated, bluntly, “We spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms.”

Removal of his name by the Leigh-Keller gang was not “caring about informers”, it was caring about the torturers. 

However the most important redactions by Leigh and Keller were directly dictated by the US intelligence services. The name of Nashwan Abd Al Razzaq Abd Al Baqi, or by another name, Abd al Hadi al Iraqi or by his number IZ-10026 was edited away from the file of Abu al-Libi (US9LY-010017DP) and elsewhere. This file is available in a redacted version of the Guardian and in the uncut version of Wikileaks. Comparison shows to what extent all the traces of al Iraqi were removed. It was not connected to “caring about informers”, for al Libi was dead, having allegedly committed suicide in a Libyan jail just before the arrival of the US Ambassador in Tripoli. The file of al Iraqi is missing in all databases; he was captured in 2005 and kept in various secret prisons, until transferred to Guantanamo where he is detained now.

Careful reading of the file shows that al-Libi was connected with al Iraqi since October 2002. In 2003, OBL stated al Libi would be the official messenger between OBL and others in Pakistan. In mid-2003, al Libi moved his family to Abbottabad, Pakistan and worked between Abbottabad and Peshawar. He maintained contact with al Iraqi.

And we know that OBL was found and killed in Abbottabad – just as this publication hit the pages of the newspapers. So the trail to Abbottabad was known to the American services at least since 2005, when al-Libi, another Abbottabad dweller, was captured. 

What we do not know is the nature of the contacts between the US authorities and  OBL. What we do know is that David Leigh and Bill Keller tried to hid it from their readers. Their redacting of the Guantanamo files, like their redacting of the Cablegate, had nothing to do with “saving informers”.

David Leigh claimed that Assange  "double-crossed" the paper by distributing the Gitmo files to various "right-wing" news organisations, meaning the conservative Daily Telegraph. This is rich.

“Left” and “right” has very little meaning nowadays, after Blair and Clinton. What is important is the position on wars and overseas interventions, susceptibility to  Secret Service meddling, subservience to the priorities of the state. 

In France, right-wing Marine Le Pen stands against foreign interventions in Libya and Côte d'Ivoire, against payments to bankers, against the president, while left-wing Bernard Henri Levy supports wars and interventions, loves bankers, is a friend of the right-wing president Sarkozy. 

In England, the Guardian is the leading newspaper for calls to war. Libya, Syria – the Guardian wants them bombed. Afghanistan, Serbia, Iraq, - the Guardian wanted them to be invaded. It is just the package is different: instead of right-wing jingoism, the Guardian served the neo-colonialist adventurism under delicate sauce of humanitarian intervention. The Guardian leads on hypocrisy. The Guardian is not the newspaper of the left; it is the problem of the left. The case of Guantanamo files proves that the Guardian redacted the most vital information as told by the CIA. 

And Osama? What about Osama bin Laden? Now we know that the US knew of his whereabouts; they knew of the trail, they asked Leigh and Keller to remove relevant references. Why didn’t they capture him or kill him earlier?

OBL’s organisation did what the US authorities wanted to be done. They fought the Russians and ruined Afghanistan. They conspired and fought against Hezbollah, slaughtered Shias in Iraq, undermined Qaddafi, hated Hamas and Iran. They supported ethnic cleansing of ‘infidels’ in Chechnya and in the Balkans. They never ever attacked Israel: they preserved their vigor for Sayyed Nasrallah. Like a dreadful beast nurtured in the CIA secret labs, only once they reportedly rebelled against their merciless creator - on 9/11. Osama was greater than, but similar to such American friends as Jonas Savimbi of Angola or Shamil Basayev of Chechnya, and hopefully after his death his organization will vanish like Unita and Basayev did.

The Guantanamo files reveal utter wretchedness of Osama’s unlucky followers. With exception of a few dozen close associates, the rest of the prisoners made a wrong choice ever listening to him. They (especially foreigners) were idealists, who wanted to establish the Kingdom of God upon the earth; they were encouraged by the US to flock to Afghanistan to fight the Commies.  The majority of them never even had a chance to hold the gun. They, the foreigners in Afghanistan and Pakistan were sold for bounty to the Americans as fast as possible. They paid for this by years of torture. And now they are about to learn that their supreme chief was safeguarded by the same Americans who tortured them!

But in the mind of the Muslim masses, OBL will be remembered (justly or not) as the architect of the only successful response of the oppressed to the Empire on its own soil. And that ensured him greatness of his own and a place in history.

Obama's Broken Guantánamo Promise

Betraying the Constitution
By SHELDON RICHMAN

IThe latest leaks of classified documents, which show that the U.S. government imprisoned hundreds of men at Guantánamo Bay on the most dubious "evidence," brings to mind the question, Why hasn't President Obama kept his promise to close the infamous prison that will forever stain America's honor?

As the UK Guardian, one of the newspapers that disclosed the documents, reported, "The U.S. military dossiers ... reveal how, alongside the so-called 'worst of the worst', many prisoners were flown to the Guantánamo cages and held captive for years on the flimsiest grounds, or on the basis of lurid confessions extracted by maltreatment.... More than two years after President Obama ordered the closure of the prison, 172 are still held there.... The files depict a system often focused less on containing dangerous terrorists or enemy fighters, than on extracting intelligence."

Many men were detained on the basis of hearsay after the U.S. government paid bounties for information. Some detainees had traveled to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban in the civil war, then were declared enemies of the United States after its invasion in October 2001. After years in custody hundreds of men whom the Bush administration had branded as the monsters were released, indicating they were no threat at all. For this reason Guantánamo is an international symbol of American criminality.

In March Obama signed an executive order permitting him to hold detainees indefinitely without charge or trial. The administration wishes to keep some prisoners in custody even though the supposed evidence against them would not be admissible in a court or even in a military tribunal, which has far less protection for defendants. Some of that evidence was obtained by methods most would regard as torture.

More than a year after Guantánamo was to be closed it remains open. Why, and why has Obama largely escaped criticism for breaking such an important pledge?

Previously the president's defenders have claimed that his efforts to close the prison were thwarted by members of Congress, mostly Republicans. Is that true?

Obama signed an executive order calling for the closure two days after he was inaugurated in 2009, when the facilities held 241 prisoners. But "the fanfare never translated into the kind of political push necessary to sustain the policy," reports the Washington Post. "The White House, often without much internal deliberation, retreated time and again in the face of political opposition."

Obama did not want to risk political capital on the matter, and no leader in Congress was willing to go out on a limb without presidential backing.

The Post reports that Obama was shocked to learn that only 20–36 of the detainees could be brought to trial: "White House officials were in such disbelief that they asked Justice Department participants to write up a memo explaining exactly why they couldn't bring more of the men to trial. In many cases, the intelligence gathered on the men was not court-worthy evidence."

Administration officials claim to be surprised that in May 2009 the Senate voted overwhelmingly against an appropriation to close Guantánamo. But how could they really have been surprised when they did little or nothing to support the objective? The Post makes clear that public opinion polls running against closure also played a role in Obama's retreat. His advisors warned that the issue would imperil his larger agenda.

Thus President Obama, the man heralded as a new kind of politician, is revealed as just another officeholder looking out for his own political fortunes. The United States had betrayed its commitment to due process and the rule of law, but rectifying that shameful record could not be allowed to impede the president's political objectives. That demonstrates a perverse set of priorities.

It's par for the course with Obama. Since taking office he has escalated the covert wars in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia and has doubled down on Afghanistan. The resulting casualties and destruction have fueled further anti-American resentment. Now he is using drones over Libya, recklessly endangering the innocent. He has done what few once thought possible: out-war-mongered the Bush-Cheney gang.

And for the most part, the phony anti-war activists of the Bush years have lost their voices.

Thrill is Gone; So is the Alternative

(Right here is where I go bonkers insane as Obama raises a billion dollars to campaign for the job he has--and sucks at--while people are desperately unemployed in an economy that people keep saying is improving, yet continues to grow weaker right as inflation starts to take hold. These people have no clue how offensive it is for a rich guy to beg money for a campaign to keep him in a job at which he is shitty, so he can sell out a few more times to his corporate buddies. Yep, I'm starting to twitch...--jef)


Sunday, April 10, 2011 by The Times-Union (New York)
by Bob Franken

What were they thinking? What possessed his strategists to decide to make President Barack Obama's re-election effort official on the same day his administration was making its final surrender on Guantanamo Bay?

Is their campaign slogan "Cave You Can Believe In"? It certainly won't be "Change You Can Believe In."

Given how it's widely believed Obama will be the first candidate ever to raise and spend a billion dollars in a presidential election campaign, "Big Bucks You Can Believe In" might be more appropriate. It looks like he'll need every bit of that treasure to turn burnout into turnout.

The danger for him is that so many Obama supporters have joined the ranks of the formerly ardent. They are disgruntled by what they perceive as an abandonment of lofty promises. Instead of raising taxes on the rich, they see him kissing up to corporate interests.

He's done little, they feel, to rein in Bush-era hard-line national security practices and now he's buckled under political pressure to wimp out on his pledge to close Guantanamo.

So the world still has the American Devil's Island to despise and will witness military tribunals there instead of civilian courts. The decision amounts to a vote of no-confidence in the Constitution. The brutal terrorist defendants get to be tried not as the low-life violent criminals that they are, but as warriors and martyrs.

Yes, the landscape has changed from 2008, when candidate Obama inspired millions with his message of politics unusual. The thrill is gone, their idealism deflated by a leader who has succumbed to harsh reality and expedience, who's all too willing to make his bargains with the defenders of the rich-get-richer status quo.

They still thirst for leadership to take the nation out of the same old partisan cynical desert. Obama, they fear, has intentionally moved to the center of that wasteland.

Sulking progressives contend that he has settled for bits of his big picture that are too small or illusory, perhaps playing into the hands of those special interests whose biggest interest is removing him and regaining full control.

The Democrats seem to have one major factor in their favor. That would be the Republicans. Some of those on the GOP presidential list range from kooks to nuts, with too few candidates offering more than sound bites.

While it is true that an unpredictable future makes presidential matchup polls silly at this stage, let's be wild and crazy and cite one anyway. A week-long Farleigh Dickinson University Public Minds survey of 800 registered voters nationwide, released March 31, shows that Obama runs statistically even with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, while he is 15 percentage points ahead of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and 20 in front of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

However, Public Minds had a glaring omission. It overlooks Donald Trump. How does one overlook Donald Trump?

As of April 5, a different firm -- Public Policy Polling -- did a survey that shows Romney in the lead among New Hampshire Republicans who took part, but, get this, Donald Trump has moved to within six points 27-21. PPP has Huckabee at 15 percent in the state, Gingrich at 13, Palin at 10, tied with U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, while former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Rep. Michelle Bachmann, R-Minn., have 4 percent each.

Obama probably should use some of his campaign money to sponsor Republican debates, so voters can hear just how loopy some of those candidates are and see that they have a choice between undelivered promises and the opposition's dangerous plans.

What a dreary message. Perhaps the all-encompassing slogan for the election should be, "It's mourning in America."

President Obama’s broken campaign promises

By Stephen C. Webster - RAW Story
Tuesday, April 5th, 2011

President Barack Obama came to office on a tide of voters eager to see a change in more than just the White House's occupant. Two years into his presidency -- and one day after he launched his 2012 reelection campaign -- and even some of his most ardent supporters are having trouble coming to terms with the answer to Sarah Palin's 2010 question: "How's that hopey, changey stuff working out?"

Polls show that less than half the country believes President Obama deserves reelection, with disaffected liberals now a fast growing demographic.

Even though Obama clearly leads all of the likely Republican front-runners at this point, the deep dissatisfaction brewing within his core constituency could make the president, and his whole party, uniquely vulnerable in next year's elections.

Below are five of the biggest campaign pledges Obama failed to keep -- for which he'll likely have to answer before election day 2012.

1. Health care for all
If you're an American making less than $30,000 a year, chances are you still have trouble seeing a doctor, despite the passage of President Obama's health care reform plan. In 2007, then-Senator Obama said he wanted to make sure no American is without access to vital medical attention and proposed using revenues from the soon-to-expire Bush tax cuts to fund it. When the campaign laid out their specific plans in 2008, they included a "public option" that would be paid for by the public at large and made available to anyone who could not obtain coverage through their employer or other public program.

Ultimately, the debate in Washington became so heated and rife with disinformation that the administration and its allies in Congress agreed to forgo the public option, using it as a bargaining chip to ensure other proposals, like ending the "pre-existing condition" exclusion in private insurance policies, were passed in the final bill. They also gave in to Republican demands and extended the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, promising to take on the issue again in 2012. In spite of the modest legislative victory of actually getting health reform passed, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that even after all the elements take effect in 2014, over 22 million Americans will still lack access to basic health services.

2. Close Guantanamo
As a symbol of everything that liberals thought to be wrong with the Bush-era, closing the Guantanamo Bay military prison in Cuba should have been an easy target for the new and popular president and his Democratic super-majority in Congress -- and, in fact, then-candidate Obama promised to do just that. But as he soon found out, strategic and political calculations have made it almost impossible to shuck.

Today, Obama has turned away from his promise to close the facility and embraced the controversial terror war symbol, ordering the resumption of military tribunals and even moving the accused 9/11 plotters' trial from a civilian court in New York City to the secret military court at Guantanamo.

3. Defend labor rights
"Understand this," Obama said during a campaign rally in 2007. "If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I’m in the White House, I will put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself, I’ll will walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States of America." (Watch.)

Despite efforts by state-level Republicans in Wisconsin, Tennessee, Michigan, Ohio, Maine, Florida and Indiana to curtail collective bargaining rights, the President has yet to offer support to a single protest or picket line.

4. Reform the Patriot Act
Contrary to popular belief, Obama has never actually argued for a repeal of the Bush administration's sweeping, post-9/11 security initiatives, which were passed with a mandatory "sunset" clause to overrule the concerns of civil libertarians at the time. Instead, Obama has consistently said he favors enhanced judicial oversight and a pullback from some warrantless searches -- like the provisions that allow the FBI to access library records without a warrant.

But every time the emergency laws have been due to expire, President Obama has pushed to extend them without any reforms. Most recently, the administration sought an extension of the Patriot Act that was even longer than the one Republicans wanted. They gave it to him and continued the sweeping spy powers through 2013, ensuring that the next extension doesn't become an election year issue.

5. End the wars
Even as a candidate, Obama maintained that Afghanistan should be "the focus" of Bush's terror war, and he pledged to make it so. But the president was also swept into power on a wave of anti-war fervor behind his calls to end the occupation of Iraq. Iraq has calmed down quite a bit as U.S. troops steadily stream out of the country, but Afghanistan is more violent than ever amid Obama's own "surge."

Even though the president promised his Afghan occupation would conclude in July 2011, military officials have admitted that sometime in 2014 is more likely. Elsewhere, American forces are dropping more bombs on more countries today than at any point during the Bush administration, with continued occupation forces in two massive countries even as they stage aerial bombardments of Pakistan, Libya and Yemen.

The Sad Defeat of Our Constitution

Tuesday, April 5, 2011 by The Huffington Post
by Kristen Breitweiser
Today I was given two hours of "advance notice" regarding DOJ's decision to not prosecute the remaining alleged 9/11 conspirators in an open court of law. According to DOJ's statement, the remaining individuals will be sent to military tribunals.

I recognize that there are many, many other things for Americans to be upset with today, but I hope everyone can take a second to contemplate this decision and recognize what it says about President Obama, the Department of Justice, and the United States.

As for the Department of Justice, it shows their inability to prosecute individuals who are responsible for the death of 3,000 people on the morning of 9/11. Apparently our Constitution and judicial system -- two of the very cornerstones that make America so great and used to set such a shining example to the rest of the world -- are not adequately set up to respond to or deal with the aftermath of terrorism. To me, this is a startling and dismal acknowledgment that perhaps Osama Bin Laden did, in fact, win on the morning of 9/11. And chillingly, I wonder whether it wasn't just the steel towers that were brought down and incinerated on 9/11, but the yellowed pages of our U.S. Constitution, as well.

And what does it say about the solemn capabilities of our Department of Justice if it is left to "subcontract out" its duties and responsibilities to the Department of Defense? We should all think about that scary notion for a bit. But, perhaps more disturbingly recognize that it is not occurring under the tutelage of Bush and Cheney, rather it is coming at the hands of Obama.

At least when President Bush was in office, he was candid about his feelings regarding the alleged 9/11 conspirators in our custody. He didn't care about them. He allowed them to be tortured. He was fine letting them rot in the heat of Guantanamo for all of eternity. They were less than human to him and he certainly was never going to afford them the benefits of our U.S. Constitution or the Geneva Conventions. That was President Bush. Whether you agreed or disagreed with him, you, at least, knew where he stood. And you could, like it or not, rely on his word.

For the past two years, it's been President Obama in the Oval Office. Quite early on in his presidency, Obama invited the 9/11 families to the White House to discuss 9/11-related issues. During this meeting in Feb '09 the topic of closing Guantanamo and the use of Article 3 courts to prosecute the remaining alleged 9/11 conspirators was discussed. Many of us were incredibly relieved to learn that as a matter of course President Obama was going to shut down Guantanamo and support the open prosecution of the alleged 9/11 conspirators. He gave us -- the various widows and children at the meeting -- his golden word. He shook our hands. He smiled broadly. He posed for pictures. (In fact, several weeks later many of the widows even received hand signed courtesy copies of these photos from Obama -- a nice touch. I did not receive such a photo.)

It's been almost ten years now since my husband was killed. My daughter has gone from a 2-year-old to a 12-year-old. Our country has started two -- and now maybe three -- pointless, misguided, costly wars. And if it wasn't already difficult enough to accept that Osama Bin Laden will probably never be caught or held accountable, now I have to swallow the fact that I will never see constitutional justice for the handful of individuals we actually hold in custody. In short, justice in a court of law for the murder of my husband and 3,000 others will never come.

I suppose in life timing is everything. To me, as a lawyer and a 9/11 widow, DOJ's announcement today acknowledges the sad defeat of our U.S. Constitution when it comes to 9/11. How truly tragic in my eyes. And you would think that a man who was once a constitutional law professor might feel the same way. Yet, not so much for President Barack Obama who has chosen this great day to announce his billion-dollar campaign for re-election. His slogan asking us to "join in" by writing him a check.

First, I've never been much of an "in"-sider. Second, I truly wonder how you can trust a leader who carries no compunction to keep his promises or his word -- whether those words and promises were made in support of gay rights, to not start or perpetuate illegal/useless/costly military campaigns (or wars), in support of environmental causes even to the detriment of big business, to put an immediate end to torture and unlawful detainment, to rein in the bloat and greed of Wall Street, to oppose gun control, or to correct the broad overreach of a previous administration.

But perhaps most pointedly, if you can't trust what a man says to a group of widows and children, then what words and promises of his can you trust?

So President Obama, am I IN? Will you be receiving my check?

Hell no.

Obama creates indefinite detention system for prisoners at Guantanamo Bay

By Peter Finn and Anne E. KornblutWashington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, March 8, 2011

President Obama signed an executive order Monday that will create a formal system of indefinite detention for those held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who continue to pose a significant threat to national security. The administration also said it will start new military commission trials for detainees there.

The announcements, coming more than two years after Obama vowed in another executive order to close the detention center, all but cements Guantanamo Bay's continuing role in U.S. counterterrorism policy.

Administration officials said the president is still committed to closing the prison, although he made no mention of that goal in a short statement Monday. The administration's original plans to create a detention center in the United States and prosecute some detainees in federal court have all but collapsed in the face of bipartisan congressional opposition.

The executive order recognizes the reality that some Guantanamo Bay detainees will remain in U.S. custody for many years, if not for life. The new system allows them the prospect of successfully arguing in the future that they should be released because they do not pose a threat.

"Today, I am announcing several steps that broaden our ability to bring terrorists to justice, provide oversight for our actions and ensure the humane treatment of detainees," Obama said in statement. "I strongly believe that the American system of justice is a key part of our arsenal in the war against al-Qaeda and its affiliates, and we will continue to draw on all aspects of our justice system - including [federal] Article III Courts - to ensure that our security and our values are strengthened."

But activists on either end of the debate over closing the prison cast the announcement as a reversal.

"It is virtually impossible to imagine how one closes Guantanamo in light of this executive order," said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "In a little over two years, the Obama administration has done a complete about-face."

Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said the order vindicated Obama's predecessor. "I commend the Obama Administration for issuing this Executive Order," he said in a statement. "The bottom line is that it affirms the Bush Administration policy that our government has the right to detain dangerous terrorists until the cessation of hostilities."

The executive order applies to at least 48 of the 172 detainees who remain at Guantanamo Bay. An inter-agency panel led by Justice Department lawyers determined that this group could not be prosecuted in military commissions or in federal court because evidentiary problems would hamper a trial. But intelligence assessments also concluded that these detainees remain a serious threat and could not be safely repatriated or resettled in a third country. The administration said it will hold reviews for detainees it plans to prosecute but has not charged.

The administration argues that it has the legal authority to continue to hold all of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay under the laws of war. Federal courts have backed that assertion, although they have found that some detainees should be released for a lack of evidence against them. The detainees will continue to have the right to petition the federal courts under the doctrine of habeas corpus.

"The new executive order doesn't change the legal authority for detention at all," said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies. "It simply provides additional reviews for individuals who have been found by the habeas courts to be lawfully detained under the laws of war."

Under the order, each detainee will receive within a year a written, unclassified review of the factors that justify his continued incarceration. A government representative will be appointed to advocate on behalf of the detainees, who will have the right to hire private counsel, but not at the government's expense, the executive order says.

A Periodic Review Board, composed of military, intelligence, Homeland Security, State and Justice Department officials, will consider each case. A detainee will have the right to appear before the board, introduce his own evidence and call witnesses "who are reasonably available," the order says.

Each detainee will receive a full review before officials every three years, and a paper review every six months.

But David Remes, an attorney who represents 20 detainees, including 16 Yemenis, said he sees no substantive difference between the new system and the review process under the George W. Bush administration, just "a new cast of characters" sitting on review boards. In light of the current administration's decision not to release any Yemenis, even those cleared for repatriation, Remes questioned whether the new system will be valid.

"What good will this do for a Yemeni?" he said. The administration has said Yemen does not have the capacity to reintegrate and monitor any returned detainees.

Moreover, recent legislation now makes it extremely difficult to transfer any detainee out of Guantanamo Bay even if he is believed to be no threat, and it is unclear how the administration will confront that congressional barrier.

The administration said that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates will issue an order rescinding the suspension of new military commission cases.

The administration is expected to charge three detainees: Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Yemeni accused of planning the October 2000 al-Qaeda attack on the USS Cole that killed 17 American sailors; Obaidullah, an Afghan accused of storing anti-tank mines; and Ahmed Darbi, a Saudi accused of planning an attack on a ship in the Strait of Hormuz that never took place.

But the case against Guantanamo Bay's most prominent detainee, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, remains in limbo. The administration had planned to Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and four co-defendants on trial in New York. But intense political and public opposition scuttled the prosecution and it is unclear where - or whether - Mohammed will be tried.

"Unfortunately, some in Congress have unwisely sought to undermine this process by imposing restrictions that challenge the Executive Branch's ability to bring to justice terrorists who seek to do Americans harm," Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a statement Monday. "We oppose those restrictions, and will continue to seek their repeal."