Author
|
Topic: Obama - Put to the test fails dismally. (Read 9347 times) |
|
MoEnzyme
Acolyte
Gender: 
Posts: 2256
Reputation: 4.69
Rate MoEnzyme
infidel lab animal
 
|
 |
Re:Obama - Put to the test fails dismally.
« Reply #45 on: 2009-07-21 22:48:26 » |
 |
At first I couldn't see posting this in Serious Business, but then I remembered this somewhat ridiculously subject framed thread by Hermit. No offense meant - Hermit is one of our best contributors and indeed I sympathize with many points he has made in this thread here, but "failing dismally" is such an amazingly low threshold that it would probably take someone like George W. Bush aided by Dick Cheney and friends to genuinely fit the bill for that subject line.
However, at this point in Obama's administration he is overdue for political crisis. First and foremost I cite his imminently stalling health care reform. Secondly is his overall approval rating . . . yes he's still generally liked, but compared to other presidents at this point he's not showing the same political champion qualities he has previously been known for.
I've been watching this evolution for a while and I think I've come to a layman's conclusion of what his problem is. He's trying too hard to be loved. It's time for more people to fear him, especially on the far right. Let's face it, they've always openly hated him anyways, they are never going to love him, and so few people outside their circles give them real credibility, that it still amazes me that he continues to pander to their interests.
The time to pivot has come. No, I don't advocate him cracking down on the no-name and small potatoes right wing masses and talking heads, but rather he should blow away the top of their pyramid. Here I'm especially talking about Dick Cheney and friends. Certainly the man through his repeated public grandstandings has been begging for this comeupance, and now after being heavily implicated in the various incompetancies of the CIA, its far past due for he and his friends to face criminal charges.
I could even forgive Obama for leaving W alone, but its long past due to start "looking backward" as both Obama and right wingers have characterized such possibilities. Sure it sounds nice to "move forward", but to successfully do that for the long run would require that we understand our present circumstances better, and understanding can only work in retrospect. That's the whole point of justice, and its time that Obama embrace that better. Sure I wouldn't expect everyone who deserves criminal prosecution to face this, but its begining to get ridiculous that the most culpable fail to lose their chips in the game. For chrissakes . . . one of them is still a federal judge long past due for impeachment and being stripped of his law license.
I bet Obama would even gain a few approval points for that, but again at this point and for lasting real success that should be irrellevant to him. We are in grave danger of overlooking the past due notices on doing the right thing.
ps - for Hermit's benefit, my brief #virus chatlog on this topic
21:26:31 MoEnzyme * MoEnzyme finally joins Hermit on the "Obama - Put to the test fails dismally." thread. @ http://www.churchofvirus.org/bbs/index.php?board=69;action=display;threadid=42746;start=45;boardseen=1
21:27:41 MoEnzyme I still object to the subject line, but then I'm not complaining either. I'm sure it gets more attention than "Obama fails somewhat" would.
|
I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
(consolidation of handles: Jake Sapiens; memelab; logicnazi; Loki; Every1Hz; and Shadow)
|
|
|
Hermit
Archon
Posts: 4287
Reputation: 8.94
Rate Hermit
Prime example of a practically perfect person
|
|
Re:Obama - Put to the test fails dismally.
« Reply #46 on: 2009-07-22 00:04:39 » |
|
Dear Mo,
I introduced this thread as a catch all to track the positive things that Obama said before (and sometimes after) taking the office of President of the USA which have been abandoned or become worse since he entered office where more specific threads do not exist. At this point I suggest that the following items belong on this list:- Economy
- Environment
- Health Care
- Transparency
- Ending Military Tribunals
- Preventing Torture of US Prisoners
- Closing Guantanamo, Baghdad Central Prison and other black holes.
- Ending the Bush wars
- Use of Signing Statements
- Accountability
- Adherence to Treaties
- Normalization of relations with Iran
- Equality for the Gay and Transgender Communities
I'm afraid that to anyone non-partisan, abysmal has to describe Obama's accomplishments to date. In fact, despite the mandate for transformation with which the Obama administration and Democratic house entered 2009, I'm really hard pressed to think of anything achieved by them to date that I might class as an accomplishment - or which is significantly different from how Cheney-Bush and the Republicans would have done it - except of course in those cases noted on this thread where the Obama administration has been more conservative and more secretive than the Cheney-Bush disaster.
Given that I think it is easy to agree that it is really difficult to do worse than the Cheney-Bush maladministration I think that "failing dismally" is indeed appropriate. Indeed, come September, I see public approval and the ability to change anything collapsing with the dollar and market. As if James Buchanan had followed Hoover with the Great Depression around his ears.
|
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
|
|
|
MoEnzyme
Acolyte
Gender:
Posts: 2256
Reputation: 4.69
Rate MoEnzyme
infidel lab animal
|
|
Re:Obama - Put to the test fails dismally.
« Reply #47 on: 2009-07-22 01:42:47 » |
|
Quote from: Hermit on 2009-07-22 00:04:39 Dear Mo,
I introduced this thread as a catch all to track the positive things that Obama said before (and sometimes after) taking the office of President of the USA which have been abandoned or become worse since he entered office where more specific threads do not exist. At this point I suggest that the following items belong on this list: |
Economy;
The economy is a bit of mixed bag at this point. Leading economic indicators have been good for several months now, plus Wall Street is already in a bit of a recovery. However unemployment as a lagging indicator is still swelling if somewhat more slowly. I'm certainly not calling Obama a genius on this issue, but if you follow shadow stats which more closely match the way unemployment was measured during the great depression we are certainly in a comparable range at over 20%. http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data If this doesn't turn around in another 12 months, I'd probably not argue against the "dismal failure" tag on this issue. but I'm still optimistic on this issue.
Environment;
Since Bush Cheney actively implied that global warming was a hoax, I think we've improved considerably. At least we have normal arguments on this topic now instead having to intensely fight the flat-earth community. Not yet a success, but if you really think its too late, then I'd argue that the dismal failure was sealed long before Obama was a serious contender for the office, and there is probably nothing that he could have done about it already.
Health Care;
A bit too much of a current issue to judge. I think he could really lose it on this one, or he could turn out to be "The One". Afterall we've fucked this issue up in the US for many (6-plus) decades on end. He's not any worse off than any other president in my lifetime yet on this issue.
Transparency;
Another issue that Obama could really lose at. Indeed I think going after Cheney is more than critical on this one. Cheney was the very embodiment of this disaster. If Obama/Holder could simply prosecute him it would free the administration to make real progress on this issue. Until then Obama is allowing Cheney to hold his administration hostage, which would indeed be a dismal failure.
Ending Military Tribunals;
No real comment. If other issues were more seriously dealt with I think this one would evaporate. More of a symptom that a cause.
Preventing Torture of US Prisoners;
He's certainly not Cheney on this one, otherwise Cheney would have little to talk about publicly. But if Obama allows Cheney to continue publicly holding his administration hostage on this issue, dismal failure would remain a possibility.
Closing Guantanamo, Baghdad Central Prison and other black holes;
While regretable, these are mostly symbolic problems rather than a root cause. Responding to this kind of symbolism, I could imagine Obama getting rid of them while dismally failing on the more basic issues which created them.
Ending the Bush wars;
I don't think he ever expressed any opposition to going after the Taliban/Al Qeda connection in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Indeed the GOP foolishly tried to criticize him during his candidacy for making it more of a regional problem than simply an Afghanistan problem like Bush tried to frame it. As far as Iraq goes . . . that's still in a bit of transition to call it a dismal failure. I suggest that Obama has never claimed he was going to end all of the Bush wars.
Use of Signing Statements;
You, I, and few other informed people care about this. Its an offensive precedent to separation of powers. While he hasn't relied on them much himself, until he and Holder make an active point of invalidating this practice, it remains a destructive possibility for much less loved future administrations.
Accountability;
Back to transparency on this.
Adherence to Treaties;
I haven't really followed this one specifically. However he has expressed little of that US exceptionalism rhetoric that the previous administration often used as a justification for unilaterally breaking with treaties.
Normalization of relations with Iran;
I think Obama's early reaching out has actually helped cause the Iranians current administration's headaches with their last election. If McCain (mr. "Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb-bomb Iran") had won, we would be in the same or worse position as pre-2009 - Amedinajad would have had a much easier election. I think the last Iranian election wouldn't have even been close or seriously contested if the US electorate had cooperated in 2008 with the incumbant hardline Iranian administration. Of course Obama has yet to make it really work for us yet, but we would have been helplessly out of control on this front if McCain had won.
Equality for the Gay and Transgender Communities;
Politically not huge issue for Democrats. But given how little taking a stand on this would have hurt him, I find it very disappointing that he hasn't. I almost wonder if McCain wouldn't have been better. Especially on the military don't ask/tell policy -- McCain has often been unusally progressive in his votes when it comes to issues for active military (even when he's ironically sucked on veteran's issues).
|
I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
(consolidation of handles: Jake Sapiens; memelab; logicnazi; Loki; Every1Hz; and Shadow)
|
|
|
Hermit
Archon
Posts: 4287
Reputation: 8.94
Rate Hermit
Prime example of a practically perfect person
|
|
Re:Obama - Put to the test fails dismally.
« Reply #48 on: 2009-07-22 05:24:13 » |
|
Democrats irked by Obama signing statement
[ Hermit : Thanks for the reply Mo. I'll try to get back to it soon, this week is likely to be busy. Meanwhile an update on signing statements. ]
Source: Associated Press
Authors: Anne Flaherty (Associated Press Writer)
Dated: 2009-07-21
President Barack Obama has irked close allies in Congress by declaring he has the right to ignore legislation on constitutional grounds after having criticized George W. Bush for doing the same.
Four senior House Democrats on Tuesday said they were "surprised" and "chagrined" by Obama's declaration in June that he doesn't have to comply with provisions in a war spending bill that puts conditions on aid provided to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
In a signing statement accompanying the $106 billion bill, Obama said he wouldn't allow the legislation to interfere with his authority as president to conduct foreign policy and negotiate with other governments.
Earlier in his six-month-old administration, Obama issued a similar statement regarding provisions in a $410 billion omnibus spending bill. He also included qualifying remarks when signing legislation that established commissions to govern public lands in New York, investigate the financial crisis and celebrate Ronald Reagan's birthday.
"During the previous administration, all of us were critical of (Bush's) assertion that he could pick and choose which aspects of congressional statutes he was required to enforce," the Democrats wrote in their letter to Obama. "We were therefore chagrined to see you appear to express a similar attitude."
The letter was signed by Reps. David Obey of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, and Barney Frank of Massachusetts, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, as well as Reps. Nita Lowey and Gregory Meeks, both of New York, who chair subcommittees on those panels.
Obama needs Obey and Frank in particular to push through Congress key pieces of his agenda, including health care and financial oversight reform.
The White House said Tuesday the administration plans to implement the provisions of the bill and suggested that Obama's signing statement was aimed more at defending the president's executive powers than skirting the law.
"The president has also already made it clear that he will not ignore statutory obligations on the basis of policy disagreements and will reserve signing statements for legislation that raises clearly identified constitutional concerns," White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said in a statement.
Bush issued a record number of signing statements while in office as he sparred with Democrats on such big issues as the war in Iraq.
Democrats, including Obama, sharply criticized Bush as overstepping his bounds as president. In March, Obama ordered a review of Bush's guidelines for implementing legislation.
"There is no doubt that the practice of issuing such statements can be abused," Obama wrote in a memo to the heads of executive departments and agencies.
At the same time, however, Obama did not rule out issuing any signing statements, which have been used for centuries. Rather, he ordered his administration to work with Congress to inform lawmakers about concerns over legality before legislation ever reaches his desk. He also pledged to use caution and restraint when writing his own signing statements, and said he would rely on Justice Department guidance when doing so.
Two days after issuing the memo, Obama issued his first signing statement after receiving a $410 billion omnibus spending bill. He said the bill would "unduly interfere" with his authority by directing him how to proceed, or not to, in negotiations and discussions with international organizations and foreign governments.
Obey and the other House lawmakers said this week that Obama's signing statement on the war bill will make it tougher in the future to persuade other lawmakers to support the World Bank and IMF.
If Congress can't place conditions on the money, "it will make it virtually impossible to provide further allocations for these institutions," they wrote.
|
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
|
|
|
Hermit
Archon
Posts: 4287
Reputation: 8.94
Rate Hermit
Prime example of a practically perfect person
|
|
Re:Obama - Put to the test fails dismally.
« Reply #49 on: 2009-07-24 05:14:29 » |
|
Obama goes to bat for Bush wiretap program
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Source: Bob Egelko (Chronicle Staff Writer)
Dated: 2009-07-16
President Obama is adamant about maintaining the secrecy of a wiretapping program authorized by George W. Bush, an administration lawyer told a federal judge in San Francisco on Wednesday.
Obama "does not intend to use the state-secrets privilege to cover up illegal activities," said Justice Department attorney Anthony Coppolino. But in exceptional circumstances, he said, the president will invoke secrecy to protect "the sources and methods of detecting terrorist attacks ... the crown jewel of the United States national security administration." [ Hermit : No matter what the administrations alleged intentions, the reality is that if this suite is about illegal activities (or as stated below, was on "legally shakey grounds"), then "state-secrets privilege to cover up illegal activities" and thus Obama has failed to achieve his stated intention and is incompetent, or was lying about its intentions and is dishonest. I'm not sure which would be worse. Perhaps MoEnzyle would like to attempt to address this. And he does, perhaps he could also address how "maintaining the secrecy" of a possibly illegal program facilitates a more transparent government, and how this differentiates the results achieved by the Obama administration from the Cheney-Bush administration). ]
Coppolino said the administration will cite national security in seeking dismissal of a lawsuit by telephone customers accusing the government of illegally intercepting phone calls and obtaining phone company records.
Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker heard about 90 minutes of arguments and said he would rule later.
The suit is similar to claims filed against AT&T and other telecommunications firms in 2006, following Bush's acknowledgement that he had authorized eavesdropping on Americans' communications with suspected foreign terrorists without seeking court approval.
Walker, in whose court the cases were consolidated, dismissed the suits earlier this year based on a 2008 law that shielded the companies from liability for alleged cooperation with surveillance that Bush had authorized.
That law did not prevent private citizens from suing the government, as long as they could show they were the targets of illegal eavesdropping. The current suit, filed by most of the same customers who sued AT&T, claims that a "dragnet surveillance" program intercepted millions of messages to mine them for suspicious content.
Although both the Bush and Obama administrations have refused to discuss the extent of phone company participation, several members of Congress have confirmed that the government obtained records from phone companies, the plaintiffs' lawyer, Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Walker.
The judge said in a 2006 ruling that AT&T had helped the government in surveillance, citing statements by federal officials and a former AT&T employee. On Wednesday, he asked Coppolino whether anything had changed that would justify dismissing the latest lawsuit.
The Justice Department lawyer replied that the plaintiffs will have to air classified information in court about "the nature and scope of the government's surveillance program" to prove their case, and the government will have to do the same to defend itself. That "would risk exceptional harm to the national security," Coppolino said.
Walker, however, cited a recent inspector general's report on U.S. intelligence that said the surveillance was far broader than Bush had described and was on legally shaky ground.
An unclassified version of the report was released last week. Walker said the full report might show whether officials had violated private citizens' constitutional rights.
|
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
|
|
|
Hermit
Archon
Posts: 4287
Reputation: 8.94
Rate Hermit
Prime example of a practically perfect person
|
|
Re:Obama - Put to the test fails dismally.
« Reply #50 on: 2009-07-25 02:56:00 » |
|
Obama Accused by Lawyers of Stonewalling on Terror Questioning
Source: bloomberg.com
Authors: Jeff Bliss
Dated: 2009-07-23
Lawyers for suspected terrorists at the U.S.’s Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba accused the Obama administration of failing to live up to its pledge of transparency and provide information that could free the detainees.
The attorneys said government officials have been no more helpful than the Bush administration in sharing transcripts of interrogations of their clients. The detainees may have been subject to harsh methods and possibly torture, the lawyers said.
The Justice Department “hasn’t changed its stonewalling position” from the Bush administration, said Professor James Cohen of Fordham University School of Law in New York, who represents two detainees. “We are asking for all this information, and they’re refusing to give it.”
Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said 50 attorneys have been combing the files in more than 150 cases involving 200 detainees and are doing their best to cooperate.
The department’s legal team “has been producing and continues to produce an extraordinary volume of information to attorneys for Guantanamo Bay detainees,” he said.
Transparency under President Barack Obama also has become an issue in a suit by the American Civil Liberties Union seeking an uncensored 2004 report by the Central Intelligence Agency’s inspector general on prisoner interrogations. The government has released a heavily redacted version.
Tug of War
The outcome of the tug of war over information may do more than help determine if the detainees stay in prison. If details of the interrogations become public, they could weaken support for the U.S. fight against Islamic militants, said Philip Heymann, a professor at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Any revelations about prisoner mistreatment “would make the public more suspicious about the war on terrorism,” said Heymann, deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton.
Justice Department lawyers say finding the information the lawyers want is time consuming and would distract from fulfilling Obama’s order to close Guantanamo by January.
Government lawyers “simply cannot take the time to do this,” said James Gilligan, a Justice Department attorney, at a court hearing last month. Some searches may take a year, he said.
In addition to the information requests, government lawyers must file 100 briefs on legal motions, help in declassifying documents and prepare for hearings, Boyd said.
Guantanamo Commitment
The administration is struggling to keep its commitment to shut Guantanamo and may not be able to move all eligible detainees to other countries by the January deadline.
On July 20, administration officials said a task force report on the legal status of more than 200 Guantanamo prisoners would be delayed by six months.
The effort to resettle the prisoners has been hampered by a law that bars their release in the U.S. through Sept. 30, an administration official said last week, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Obama and senior members of his administration have shown increasing reluctance to disclose information on what U.S. interrogators did to get their subjects to talk.
In May, Obama reversed course and sought to block the release of photographs that show abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.
CIA Cables
On June 8, CIA Director Leon Panetta in a 24-page document objected to the release of agency cables detailing the treatment of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, alleged al-Qaeda members who underwent waterboarding, or simulated drowning.
The administration’s stance has frustrated Brent Mickum, Zubaydah’s lawyer.
“There is certainly a large group of us who has basically written” Obama off, he said.
Zubaydah said he was subjected to 12 controversial techniques, such as placement of his neck in a collar before he was thrown against a wall, according to a 2007 International Committee of the Red Cross report.
Defense attorneys said they want the interrogation transcripts to determine whether the tactics may have traumatized their clients so much that they were coerced into admitting crimes even when the tactics weren’t used.
Government lawyers aren’t required to release the transcripts unless they use them in their cases, said Boyd, the Justice Department spokesman.
The transcripts are part of a larger battle over disclosure in the detainee cases.
Zubaydah’s Defense
Mickum said he has received so little information from the Justice Department that it has been difficult to mount Zubaydah’s defense.
“We have an almost impossible situation because they’re not giving us anything,” he said.
Shayana Kadidal, a detainees’ lawyer, said government lawyers are less interested in fairness than winning.
Justice Department lawyers “are programmed to beat you and they’re going to take advantage of everything to do that,” said Kadidal, senior managing attorney for the Guantanamo Global Justice Initiative at the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights.
In some respects, Obama has been more willing to make information public than President George W. Bush. In April, Attorney General Eric Holder released four memos in which the Justice Department authorized the CIA to use the interrogation techniques.
The administration also has extended the hours that defense lawyers can examine classified materials in preparing their cases, Kadidal said.
Not Far Enough
Yet a federal judge last month agreed with detainees’ lawyers that the government wasn’t going far enough. U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan rejected a government motion to perform limited searches for defense attorneys of large databases on Guantanamo prisoners.
He called the motion a “Hobson’s choice” between little information and none at all.
The government should hire additional attorneys so it can share more documents as soon as possible, Hogan said.
Brian Neff, one of the defense attorneys, said in an interview that the government has run out of excuses for delays.
“Our clients have been there for over seven years” he said. “The government has had enough time to collect” the information.
|
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
|
|
|
MoEnzyme
Acolyte
Gender:
Posts: 2256
Reputation: 4.69
Rate MoEnzyme
infidel lab animal
|
|
Re:Obama - Put to the test fails dismally.
« Reply #51 on: 2009-08-09 23:22:42 » |
|
Hermit,
I really love this thread despite however much I criticize the chosen subject heading. I agree, legally Obama has already endorsed many constitutional excesses that the Bush/Cheney have already pushed. Signing statements should really be nothing more than a political media moment and preferably absent. Given that the man was a constitutional law professor makes it only more disturbing. Sure I'm happy that we aren't legitimizing torture like we did before, but the creep of fascism is palpably odious. With that and all the unconstitutional wiretapping I only wonder how friendly we can keep our fascist system before it finally collapses under its own dead weight or we can have a long overdue reform preferrably through constitutional convention. While I think many of his intentions are basically good for now, he isn't going to be our president someday forseeable in my lifetime and his effective endorsement of many practices of the BushCheney debacle serve as ever more weight for disturbing precedents for future tyrants.
He is, however, taking on an amazing number of emergencies at once. Of course I'd love to have both an ethical and political giant at the helm. Such a person has been simply unavailable to US leadership lately. If he keeps his learning curve open and continuous, he may yet find that person for us even if it probably isn't going to be him. No he's not "the one" . . . indeed its been more of the GOP strategy to set him up for such unreasonable expectations, which is why I find myself wondering why your subject line seems complicit in such framing. He's merely a competant politician, which has recently been sorely lacking at the upper echelons of our US leadership in both parties. On that note, I'm happy to have him. On the other hand, I agree we shouldn't confuse him for the cure of all that ails us. If he's the pinnacle for our future leadership, even if he's better than our recent examples, we are screwed.
-Mo
|
I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
(consolidation of handles: Jake Sapiens; memelab; logicnazi; Loki; Every1Hz; and Shadow)
|
|
|
letheomaniac
Archon
Gender: 
Posts: 267
Reputation: 8.41
Rate letheomaniac
|
|
Re:Obama - Put to the test fails dismally.
« Reply #52 on: 2009-08-21 05:13:17 » |
|
[letheomaniac] Behold! More erudite Bush-isms!
Source: Information Clearing House/Press TV
Author: uncredited
Dated: 18/8/09
Obama: Afghan war Secures The USA
US President Barack Obama says there will be no quick or easy victory over the Taliban, noting that the war in Afghanistan is crucial in protecting Americans from terrorism.
Talking in a meeting of veterans in Arizona on Monday, Obama tried to step up the campaign in Afghanistan. “The insurgency in Afghanistan didn't just happen overnight and we won't defeat it overnight," he said.
US administration is sending 30,000 extra troops to Afghanistan, therefore the success or failure of the mission of US forces in the war-torn country is crucial for its future plans in the region.
"This will not be quick, nor easy. But we must never forget this is not a war of choice, this is a war of necessity," he said. "If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al-Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans," he said.
The remarks came a day after British Prime Minister Gordon Brown trying to ease the growing opposition to the Afghan war said the war in Afghanistan is a "sacrifice" made to make "Britain and the rest of the world" a safer place.
The two leaders however failed to elaborate the dire situation the war-ravaged nation has been facing ever since the US-led coalition forces invaded their country more than eight years ago.
According to UN figures, Afghan civilians remain the main victims of the notorious war which was launched to allegedly destroy the militancy and arrest militant leaders including Osama bin Laden.
This week's Afghan presidential and provincial elections will be considered as a test of the new US strategy of providing security on the ground.
This is while, Taliban vowing to interrupt the election, have already fired rockets at the Afghan capital twice this month.
A rocket hit Tuesday the presidential palace in the center of Afghan capital, Kabul and a second struck the city's police headquarters.
Also on Saturday, a suicide car bomb exploded outside the NATO military headquarters in the Afghan capital Kabul near the US embassy, killing seven people and injuring scores.
|
"You can't teach an old dogma new tricks." - Dorothy Parker
|
|
|
Hermit
Archon
Posts: 4287
Reputation: 8.94
Rate Hermit
Prime example of a practically perfect person
|
|
Re:Obama - Put to the test fails dismally.
« Reply #53 on: 2009-08-21 06:09:56 » |
|
[Obama] "This will not be quick, nor easy. But we must never forget this is not a war of choice, this is a war of necessity," he said. "If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al-Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans,"
[Hermit] But hold on a minute. Al Qaeda planned 9/11 in Germany.
[Hermit] So Obama is bombing the police, civilians and mayhap an occasional guerilla (most likely inspired by American attacks or ongoing occupations) in the wrong countries!
[Hermit] According to this, we should stop bombing Central and Western Asia and switch our attention to Europe immediately. Or recognize that "plotting to kill" only requires a functional brain, and despite the best efforts of America's education departments (Newspeak for "making people stupid"), these still are present in many countries, some of which are not yet under attack by the USA.
[Hermit] Does appointment to the US presidency absolutely require a frontal lobotomy these days?
|
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
|
|
|
MoEnzyme
Acolyte
Gender:
Posts: 2256
Reputation: 4.69
Rate MoEnzyme
infidel lab animal
|
|
Re:Obama - Put to the test fails dismally.
« Reply #54 on: 2009-08-24 20:37:10 » |
|
Eric Holder releases info and appoints prosecutor in CIA/torture connection. Not dismal failure.
There will be little to no US public support for this. Holder is doing this because he must in order to remain relevant in the long run. He will get much abuse for it in the short term. My hat is truly off to him to him for that even if its the least he could do. He could have only done so through a sense of that vision. Obama will get some criticism, but he's done everything to indicate that it wasn't his decision.
We simply can't pretend to do any justice with a straight face if no one gets prosecuted for the torture memos. I think this is as good a place as any to start.
|
I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
(consolidation of handles: Jake Sapiens; memelab; logicnazi; Loki; Every1Hz; and Shadow)
|
|
|
Hermit
Archon
Posts: 4287
Reputation: 8.94
Rate Hermit
Prime example of a practically perfect person
|
|
Re:Obama - Put to the test fails dismally.
« Reply #55 on: 2009-08-25 07:53:39 » |
|
If Eric Holder's "investigation" works out the way it is currently being marketed, as a search for scapegoats at the bottom of the pile, who perhaps used 401ml of water to torture a prisoner rather than the grossly illegal "sanctioned" torture using 400ml, who hit them with a brick rather than a 2"x4", kept them awake and in tortuous positions for 80 days and 15 minutes instead of 80 days or froze them at 39F instead of 40F, all in the absence of effective evidence due to the wholesale destruction of evidence by our government and its agents and the deliberate sub-contracting of torture to avoid records and retribution, then it is nothing less than a criminal evasion of our constitutionally and internationally mandated responsibility not to prosecute those responsible for the wholesale breaching of International Treaties and US law. Such an investigation implicitly adopts the "I was only following orders" approach invalidated by precedent and law, by examining only those who exceeded their blatantly illegal orders, and utterly evades the culpability of those issuing, facilitating and complying with these illegal orders.
As currently described, rather than a panacea, this "forward moving" attempted whitewash merely emphasizes the uncaring, unthinking, hypocrisy of the American people and the collapse of its legal system, in no small part due to the dismal failure of President Obama and the Democratic Congress to address their responsibilities. Given that many members of the ruling Mafioso, the Democrats, were allegedly involved in setting up this system and evidentially are involved in establishing this massive subversion of justice, this hobbled investigation looks more and more like a conspiracy worthy of a separate investigation by a truly independent prosecutor - under the RICO act.
Hermit
|
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
|
|
|
MoEnzyme
Acolyte
Gender:
Posts: 2256
Reputation: 4.69
Rate MoEnzyme
infidel lab animal
|
|
Re:Obama - Put to the test fails dismally.
« Reply #56 on: 2009-08-25 13:08:11 » |
|
Almost more interesting to me was Obama's moving interrogation out of CIA jurisdiction, subjecting all future procedures to FBI oversight - one of our last federal institutions who have remained firmly opposed to torture. A strong, and perhaps the only possible endorsement for civilization and competant homeland security. Cheney objects of course. 
|
I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
(consolidation of handles: Jake Sapiens; memelab; logicnazi; Loki; Every1Hz; and Shadow)
|
|
|
Blunderov
Archon
Gender:
Posts: 3160
Reputation: 8.90
Rate Blunderov
"We think in generalities, we live in details"
|
|
Re:Obama - Put to the test fails dismally.
« Reply #57 on: 2009-09-02 16:37:19 » |
|
[Blunderov] Pilger sums up. I'm not quite as sanguine as he with regard to the rise of the American working class(es). As long as the bread and circuses continue I don't see it happening. Perhaps these will become unaffordable though. It seems possible....
Power, Illusion, and America’s Last Taboo
02 September 2009, 06:03:26 PM
John Pilger
The following article is the text from John Pilger’s address to Socialism 2009 in San Francisco, California on 4 July.
Two years ago, at Socialism 2007 in Chicago, I spoke about an “invisible government,” a term used by Edward Bernays, one of the founders of modern propaganda. It was Bernays who, in the 1920s, invented “public relations” as a euphemism for propaganda. Deploying the ideas of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, Bernays campaigned on behalf of the tobacco industry for American women to take up smoking as an act of feminist liberation; he called cigarettes “torches of freedom.”
The invisible government that Bernays had in mind brought together the power of all media — PR, the press, broadcasting, advertising. It was the power of form: of branding and image-making over substance and truth — and I would like to talk today about this invisible government’s most recent achievement: the rise of Barack Obama and the silencing of the left.
First, I would like to go back some 40 years to a sultry day in Vietnam.
I was a young war correspondent who had just arrived in a village called Tuylon. My assignment was to write about a company of US Marines who had been sent to this village to win hearts and minds.
“My orders”, said the Marine sergeant, “are to sell the American Way of Liberty as stated in the Pacification Handbook. This is designed to win the hearts and minds of folks as stated on page 86.” Page 86 was headed WHAM: Winning Hearts and Minds. The marine unit was a Combined Action Company which, explained the sergeant, “means that we attack these folks on Mondays and win their hearts and minds on Tuesdays”. He was joking, though not quite.
The sergeant, who didn’t speak Vietnamese, had arrived in the village, stood up in a jeep and said through a bullhorn: “Come on out everybody, we got rice and candy and toothbrushes to give you!…”
There was silence.
“Now listen, either you gooks come on out, or we’re going to come right in there and get you!”
The people of Tuylon finally came out, and stood in line to receive packets of Uncle Ben’s Miracle Rice, Hershey bars, party balloons and several thousand toothbrushes. Three portable, battery-operated, yellow flush lavatories were held back for the arrival of the colonel.
And when the colonel arrived that evening, the district chief was summoned, and the yellow flush lavatories were unveiled. The colonel cleared his throat and produced a handwritten speech.
“Mr. District Chief and all you nice people,” he said, “what these gifts represent is more than the sum of their parts. They carry the spirit of America. Ladies and gentlemen, there’s no place on earth like America. It’s the land where miracles happen. It’s a guiding light for me, and for you. In America, you see, we count ourselves as real lucky having the greatest democracy the world has ever known, and we want you nice people to share in our good fortune.”
Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, even John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” got a mention. All that was missing was the Star Spangled Banner playing in the background.
Of course, the villagers had no idea what the colonel was talking about. When the Marines clapped, they clapped. When the colonel waved, the children waved. As he departed, the colonel shook the sergeant’s hand and said: “You’ve got plenty of hearts and minds here. Carry on, Sergeant?”
“Yessir.”
In Vietnam, I witnessed many spectacles like that. I had grown up in faraway Australia on a steady cinematic diet of John Wayne, Randolph Scott, Walt Disney, the Three Stooges and Ronald Reagan. The American Way of Liberty they portrayed might well have been lifted from the WHAM handbook.
I learned that the United States had won World War Two on its own and now led the “free world” as the “chosen” society. It was only much later when I read Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion that I understood something of the power of emotions attached to false ideas and bad history.
Historians call this “exceptionalism” — the notion that the United States has a divine right to bring what it calls liberty to the rest of humanity. Of course, this is a very old refrain; the French and British created and celebrated their own “civilizing mission” while imposing colonial regimes that denied basic civil liberties.
However, the power of the American message is different. Whereas the Europeans were proud imperialists, Americans are trained to deny their imperialism. As Mexico was conquered and the Marines sent to rule Nicaragua, American textbooks referred to an “age of innocence.” American motives were well meaning, moral, exceptional, as the colonel said. There was no ideology, they said; and this is still the received wisdom. Indeed, Americanism is an ideology that is unique because its main element is its denial that it is an ideology. It is both conservative and liberal, both right and left. All else is heresy.
Barack Obama is the embodiment of this “ism”. Since Obama was elected, leading liberals have talked about America returning to its true status as a “nation of moral ideals” — the words of Paul Krugman in the New York Times. In the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford wrote that, “spiritually advanced people regard the new president as ‘a Lightworker’ . . . who can help usher in a new way of being on the planet.”
Tell that to an Afghan child whose family has been blown away by Obama’s bombs, or a Pakistani child whose family are among the 700 civilians killed by Obama’s drones. Or Tell it to a child in the carnage of Gaza caused by American smart weapons which, disclosed Seymour Hersh, were resupplied to Israel for use in the slaughter “only after the Obama team let it be known it would not object.” The man who stayed silent on Gaza is the man who now condemns Iran.
Obama’s is the myth that is America’s last taboo. His most consistent theme was never change; it was power. The United States, he said, “leads the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good . . . We must lead by building a 21st century military to ensure the security of our people and advance the security of all people.” And there is this remarkable statement: “At moments of great peril in the past century our leaders ensured that America, by deed and by example, led and lifted the world, that a we stood and fought for the freedom sought by billions of people beyond their borders.” At the National Archives on May 21, he said: “From Europe to the Pacific, we’ve been the nation that has shut down torture chambers and replaced tyranny with the rule of law.”
Since 1945, “by deed and by example,” the United States has overthrown fifty governments, including democracies, and crushed some 30 liberation movements, and supported tyrannies and set up torture chambers from Egypt to Guatemala. Countless men, women and children have been bombed to death. Bombing is apple pie. And yet, here is the 44th President of the United States, having stacked his government with warmongers and corporate fraudsters and polluters from the Bush and Clinton eras, teasing us while promising more of the same.
Here is the House of Representatives, controlled by Obama’s Democrats, voting to approve $16 billion for three wars and a coming presidential military budget which, in 2009, will exceed any year since the end of World War Two, including the spending peaks of the Korean and Vietnam wars. And here is a peace movement, not all of it but much of it, prepared to look the other way and believe or hope that Obama will restore, as Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times, the “nation of moral ideals.”
Not long ago, I visited the American Museum of History in the celebrated Smithsonian Institute in Washington. One of the most popular exhibitions was called The Price of Freedom: Americans at War. It was holiday time and lines of happy people, including many children, shuffled through a Santa’s grotto of war and conquest, where messages about their nation’s “great mission” were lit up. These included tributes to the quote “exceptional Americans [who] saved a million lives” in Vietnam where they were quote “determined to stop communist expansion.” In Iraq, other brave Americans quote “employed air strikes of unprecedented precision.”
What was shocking was not so much the revisionism of two of the epic crimes of modern times but the sheer routine scale of omission.
Like all US presidents, Bush and Obama have much in common. The wars of both presidents, and the wars of Clinton and Reagan, Carter and Ford, Nixon and Kennedy, are justified by the enduring myth of exceptional America — a myth the late Harold Pinter described as “a brilliant, witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
The clever young man who recently made it to the White House is a very fine hypnotist, partly because it is so extraordinary to see an African-American at the pinnacle of power in the land of slavery. However, this is the 21st century, and race — together with gender and even class — can be very seductive tools of propaganda. For what matters, above race and gender, is the class one serves.
George Bush’s inner circle — from the State Department to the Supreme Court — was perhaps the most multi racial in presidential history. It was PC par excellence. Think Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell. It was also the most reactionary.
To many, Obama’s very presence in the White House reaffirms the moral nation. He is a marketing dream. Like Calvin Klein or Benetton, he is a brand that promises something special — something exciting, almost risqué, as if he might be a radical, as if he might enact change. He makes people feel good. He’s postmodern man with no political baggage.
In his book, Dreams From My Father, Obama refers to the job he took after he graduated from Columbia University in 1983. He describes his employer as “a consulting house to multinational corporations.” For some reason, he does not say who his employer was or what he did there. The employer was Business International Corporation, which has a long history of providing cover for the CIA with covert action, and infiltrating unions and the left. I know this because it was especially active in my own country, Australia.
Obama does not say what he did at Business International; and there may be nothing sinister, but it seems worthy of enquiry, and debate, surely, as a clue to whom the man is.
During his brief period in the Senate, Obama voted to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He voted for the Patriot Act. He refused to support a bill for single-payer health care. He supported the death penalty. As a presidential candidate, he received more corporate backing than John McCain. He promised to close Guantanamo as a priority and has not. Instead, he has excused the perpetrators of torture, reinstated the infamous military commissions, kept the Bush gulag intact and opposed habeus corpus.
Daniel Ellsberg was right when he said that, under Bush, a military coup had taken place in the United States, giving the Pentagon unprecedented powers. These powers have been reinforced by the presence of Robert Gates, a Bush family crony and George W. Bush’s secretary of defense, and by all the Bush Pentagon officials and generals who have kept their jobs under Obama.
In Colombia, Obama is planning to spend $46 million on a new military base that will support a regime backed by death squads and further the tragic history of Washington’s intervention in Latin America.
In a pseudo event staged in Prague, Obama promised a world without nuclear weapons to a global audience mostly unaware that America is building new tactical nuclear weapons designed to blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional war. Like George Bush, he used the absurdity of Europe threatened by Iran to justify building a missile system aimed at Russia and China.
In a pseudo event at the Annapolis Naval Academy, decked with flags and uniforms, Obama lied that the troops were coming home. The head of the army, General George Casey, says America will be in Iraq for up to a decade; other generals say fifteen years. Units will be relabeled as trainers; mercenaries will take their place. That is how the Vietnam War endured past the American “withdrawal”.
Chris Hedges, author of Empire of Illusion puts it well. “President Obama,” he wrote, “does one thing and Brand Obama gets you to believe another. This is the essence of successful advertising. You buy or do what the advertiser wants because of how they can make you feel.” And so you are kept in “a perpetual state of childishness.” He calls this “junk politics.”
The tragedy is that Brand Obama appears to have crippled or absorbed the antiwar movement, the peace movement. Out of 256 Democrats in Congress, thirty are willing to stand against Obama’s and Nancy Pelosi’s war party. On June 16, they voted for $106 billion for more war.
In Washington, the Out of Iraq Caucus is out of action. Its members can’t even come up with a form of words of why they are silent. On March 21, a demonstration at the Pentagon by the once mighty United for Peace and Justice drew only a few thousand. The outgoing president of UPJ, Leslie Cagan, says her people aren’t turning up because, “it’s enough for many of them that Obama has a plan to end the war and that things are moving in the right direction.” And where is the mighty MoveOn these days? Where is its campaign against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? And what exactly was said when, in February, MoveOn’s executive director, Jason Ruben, met President Obama?
Yes, a lot of good people mobilized for Obama. But what did they demand of him — apart from the amorphous “change”? That isn’t activism.
Activism doesn’t give up. Activism is not about identity politics. Activism doesn’t wait to be told. Activism doesn’t rely on the opiate of hope. Woody Allen once said, “I felt a lot better when I gave up hope.” Real activism has little time for identity politics, a distraction that confuses and suckers good people everywhere.
I write for the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto, or rather I used to write for it. In February, I sent the foreign editor an article that raised questions about Obama as a progressive force. The article was rejected. Why? I asked. “For the moment,” wrote the editor, “we prefer to maintain a more ‘positive’ approach to the novelty presented by Obama . . . we will take on specific issues . . . but we would not like to say that he will make no difference.”
In other words, an American president drafted to promote the most rapacious system in history is ordained and depoliticized by the left. What is remarkable about this state of affairs is that the so-called radical left has never been more aware, more conscious, of the iniquities of power. The Green Movement, for example, has raised the consciousness of millions of people, so that almost every child knows something about global warming; and yet there is a resistance within the green movement to the notion of power as a military project. Similar observations can be made of the gay and feminist movements; as for the labor movement, is it still breathing?
One of my favorite quotations is from Milan Kundera: “The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” We should never forget that the primary goal of great power is to distract and limit our natural desire for social justice and equity and real democracy. Long ago, Bernays’s invisible government of propaganda elevated big business from its unpopular status as a kind of mafia to that of a patriotic driving force. The American Way of Life began as an advertising slogan. The modern image of Santa Claus was an invention of Coca Cola.
Today, we are presented with an extraordinary opportunity, thanks to the crash of Wall Street and the revelation, for ordinary people, that the free market has nothing to do with freedom. The opportunity is to recognize a stirring in America that is unfamiliar to many on the left, but is related to a great popular movement growing all over the world.
In Latin America, less than 20 years ago, there was the usual despair, the usual divisions of poverty and freedom, the usual thugs in uniforms running unspeakable regimes. There is now a people’s movement based on the revival of indigenous cultures and languages, and a history of popular and revolutionary struggle less affected by ideological distortions than anywhere else.
The recent, amazing achievements in Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, El Salvador, Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay represent a struggle for community and political rights that is truly historic, with implications for all of us. These successes are expressed perversely in the overthrow of the government of Honduras, for the smaller the country the greater the threat that the contagion of emancipation will follow.
Across the world, social movements and grassroots organizations have emerged to fight free market dogma. They have educated governments in the south that food for export is a problem rather than a solution to global poverty. They have politicized ordinary people to stand up for their rights, as in the Philippines and South Africa. An authentic globalization is growing as never before, and this is exciting.
Consider the remarkable boycott, disinvestment and sanctions campaign — BDS for short — aimed at Israel, that is sweeping the world. Israeli ships have been turned away from South Africa and western Australia. A French company has been forced to abandon plans to built a railway connecting Jerusalem with illegal Israeli settlements. Israeli sporting bodies find themselves isolated. Universities have begun to sever ties with Israel, and students are active for the first time in a generation. Thanks to them, Israel’s South Africa moment is approaching, for this is, partly, how apartheid was defeated.
In the 1950s, we never expected the great wind of the 1960s to blow. Feel the breeze today. In the last eight months millions of angry emails, sent by ordinary Americans, have flooded Washington. This has not happened before. People are outraged as their lives are attacked; they bear no resemblance to the massive mass presented by the media.
Look at the polls that are seldom reported. More than two thirds of Americans say the government should care for those who cannot care for themselves; 64 percent would pay higher taxes to guarantee health care for everyone; 59 percent are favorable towards unions; 70 percent want nuclear disarmament; 72 percent want the US completely out of Iraq; and so on.
For too long, ordinary Americans have been cast in stereotypes that are contemptuous. That is why the progressive attitudes of ordinary people are seldom reported in the media. They are not ignorant. They are subversive. They are informed. And they are “anti-American”.
I once asked a friend, the great American war correspondent and humanitarian Martha Gellhorn, to explain “anti-American” to me. “I’ll tell you what ‘anti-American’ is,” she said. “It’s what governments and their vested interested call those who honor America by objecting to war and the theft of resources and believing in all of humanity. There are millions of these anti-Americans in the United States. They are ordinary people who belong to no elite and who judge their government in moral terms, though they would call it common decency. They are not vain. They are the people with a wakeful conscience, the best of America’s citizens. They can be counted on. They were in the south with the Civil Rights movement, ending slavery. They were in the streets, demanding an end to the wars in Asia. Sure, they disappear from view now and then, but they are like seeds beneath the snow. I would say they are truly exceptional.”
A certain populism is once again growing in America and which has a proud, if forgotten past. In the nineteenth century, an authentic grassroots Americanism was expressed in populism’s achievements: women’s suffrage, the campaign for an eight-hour day, graduated income tax and public ownership of railways and communications, and breaking the power of corporate lobbyists.
The American populists were far from perfect; at times they would keep bad company, but they spoke from the ground up, not from the top down. They were betrayed by leaders who urged them to compromise and merge with the Democratic Party. Does that sound familiar?
What Obama and the bankers and the generals, and the IMF and the CIA and CNN fear is ordinary people coming together and acting together. It is a fear as old as democracy: a fear that suddenly people convert their anger to action and are guided by the truth. “At a time of universal deceit,” wrote George Orwell, “telling the truth a revolutionary act.”
* Watch a video of Pilger’s address.
|
|
|
|
|
Blunderov
Archon
Gender:
Posts: 3160
Reputation: 8.90
Rate Blunderov
"We think in generalities, we live in details"
|
|
Re:Obama - Put to the test fails dismally.
« Reply #58 on: 2009-09-02 17:26:03 » |
|
[Blunderov] I read once that there is a Japanese word which translates to something like 'makes-busy-work'. It arises in the context of those office workers who make a great show of being busy without actually ever getting very much done.Sadly, Obama seems to be just such a desk tidier. <disappointed>
American Diplomats Advocated "Nuremberg Defense"
First Posted: 09- 1-09 01:28 PM | Updated: 09- 1-09 02:53 PM
By Scott Horton
Special to the Huffington Post
Huffpost
Two newly-obtained documents show how American diplomats during the Bush administration worked tenaciously to incorporate what is commonly known as the Nuremberg Defense into a new international convention addressing enforced disappearances.
The rejection of the notion that government agents could avoid liability for crimes by arguing that they were simply following orders had been a bedrock principle of the American government ever since shortly after the end of World War II, when that defense was employed during the Nuremberg war-crimes trials.
But the new documents, obtained by the ACLU through Freedom of Information Act litigation, show how State Department officials tried to establish what they called "the good soldier defense" -- in this case, the right of government agents charged with seizing and holding people in violation of international law to claim as a defense that they acted in good faith based on representations as to the legality of the conduct they were undertaking.
American officials found themselves "virtually alone" at the negotiating table with this position, facing criticism from long-established allies, the documents show. The efforts occurred in the context of a proposed "Convention on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances" in 2004 and 2006. The documents are available here and here.
Previously released documents show how Bush administration lawyers in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel gave government agents legal cover to conduct a variety of actions, including torture, that critics say were flatly contrary to domestic law.
"What the OLC memos did on a domestic basis, these documents show American diplomats attempting to do on the international stage," said Joanne Mariner, an analyst at Human Rights Watch with expertise on the U.S. extraordinary renditions program.
The documents show that the diplomats struggled against the prohibition on "disappearings" in other ways as well. They sought an exception from the requirement that it be incorporated in specific criminal legislation, arguing that this was difficult for a federal state to do since criminal law was largely the responsibility of the states. They also opposed the idea that a state be required to disclose basic information about prisoners it holds.
In a 2006 document, American diplomats argue that the new convention should not be a part of the law of armed conflict. This appears designed to lay the foundation for an argument that the prohibition of "disappearings" did not apply during war time, such as the "war on terror."
The effort to ban "disappearings" was of obvious concern to United States diplomats because of the CIA's extraordinary renditions program, under which individuals were seized through extralegal processes around the world and then held in secret prisoners known as "black sites" which the CIA set up in a number of cooperating nations.
Indeed, the program as the Bush Administration operated it appears to be precisely what the draft convention was designed to outlaw. Black sites have previously been identified in Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Morocco, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Thailand. The prisoners held in this system, were initially known as "ghost detainees" because they were held without disclosing their identity to the International Committee of the Red Cross. They were not held on criminal charges or in connection with any legal proceedings whatsoever. This brings their detention within the parameters of "enforced disappearances" covered by the proposed convention.
Before the Bush Administration, the United States viewed "enforced disappearances" as a crime--bringing criminal charges as early as 1946 against German military and government officials who implemented a program under which people were secretly seized and held outside of recourse to any legal process.
In his second day in office, President Barack Obama shut down the system of black sites and torture practices associated with them. He did not end the renditions program altogether, and the Huffington Post recently reported on the first Obama-era rendition. However, Obama and other leading policy-makers have indicated that renditions in the future would be for purposes of holding an individual to account under law, usually through criminal charges. A rendition undertaken for purposes of bringing the prisoner to account under legal charges would not violate the proposed convention on disappearances.
Domestically, the Bush Administration successfully resurrected the "good soldier" or Nuremberg Defense with respect to possible prosecutions relating to the mistreatment of detainees. Administration lawyers incorporated such provisions in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005; and those provisions were also incorporated in the Military Commissions Act of 2006. The Bush proposals were enacted by Republican-dominated Congresses. Although President Obama has suggested that the Military Commissions Act should be repealed, he has not yet taken efforts to do so.
The U.S. legislation creates a defense in U.S. courts that would not be permitted under the proposed Convention, nor would it likely be recognized in courts outside of the United States. Under this defense, persons who participated in the extraordinary renditions program would be entitled to defend themselves by stating that they were informed that the program was legal. A series of once-secret memoranda prepared by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel approving the extraordinary renditions program have recently been made public. Most of these memos have since been rescinded.
The documents reveal that the State Department opposed efforts to bar the Nuremberg Defense, as a matter of "procedural due process"--arguing that it would be unfair to potential government agents if they could not argue that they were simply following orders which they understood were lawful. Gabor Rona, international legal director at Human Rights First, and a former Red Cross lawyer in Geneva, said he was "not surprised that the U.S. found no allies on this issue. It's clear that the American diplomats were doing what they could to protect the Bush Administration's extraordinary renditions program--and what other nations would simply have called 'enforced disappearance,' just what this convention is designed to outlaw."
Rona also didn't think much of the justification that was advanced. "The Bush Administration's extraordinary renditions program involved kidnapping people and then engaging in wholesale violation of their procedural rights. Defending their negotiating position on procedural due process grounds lacks credibility." Mariner stated "this was a landmark effort to create a treaty requiring that enforced 'disappearances' be prosecuted. But the Bush Administration took positions designed to defend a program of enforced 'disappearances' from prosecution. This shows how isolated United States had become and how it had come to be motivated by defending an illegitimate policy, rather than making good international law."
Former State Department Legal Advisor John Bellinger declined a request for comment.
About Scott Horton
Scott Horton is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine, where he writes on law and national security issues, and an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School, where he teaches international private law and the law of armed conflict. A life-long human rights advocate, Scott served as counsel to Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner, among other activists in the former Soviet Union. He is a co-founder of the American University in Central Asia, where he currently serves as a trustee. Scott recently led a number of studies of issues associated with the conduct of the war on terror, including the introduction of highly coercive interrogation techniques and the program of extraordinary renditions for the New York City Bar Association, where he has chaired several committees, including, most recently, the Committee on International Law. He is also an associate of the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, a member of the board of the National Institute of Military Justice, Center on Law and Security of NYU Law School, the EurasiaGroup and the American Branch of the International Law Association and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He co-authored a recent study on legal accountability for private military contractors, Private Security Contractors at War. He appeared at an expert witness for the House Judiciary Committee three times in the past two years testifying on the legal status of private military contractors and the program of extraordinary renditions and also testified as an expert on renditions issue before an investigatory commission of the European Parliament.
|
|
|
|
|
Hermit
Archon
Posts: 4287
Reputation: 8.94
Rate Hermit
Prime example of a practically perfect person
|
|
Re:Obama - Put to the test fails dismally.
« Reply #59 on: 2009-09-02 21:08:43 » |
|
The More Things Change
[ Hermit : Funny, this article came out after I had written my "Dismal Obama Poll. How do you rate him?" piece, but before I posted it. Then Blunderov posted the wicked "American Diplomats Advocated "Nuremberg Defense" to the "Obama - Put to the test fails dismally" thread. Which brought all of the pieces together in a way that highlights why, for us, Obama is turning out to be a dismal failure. ]
Source: Antiwar.com
Authors: Tom Engelhardt
Dated: 2009-09-02
A presidential candidate opposed to the Iraq War is elected and enters the Oval Office. Yet six months later, there are still essentially the same number of troops in Iraq as were there when his predecessor left, the same number, in fact, used in the original invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Moreover, the new president remains on the “withdrawal” schedule the previous administration laid out for him with the same caveats being issued about whether it can even be met.
That administration also built a humongous, three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar embassy in Baghdad, undoubtedly the most expensive on the planet. Staffed with approximately 1,000 “diplomats,” it was clearly meant to be a massive command center for Iraq (and, given neocon dreams, the region). Last weekend, well into the Obama era, the Washington Post reported that the State Department’s yearly budget for “running” that embassy – $1.5 billion (that is not a misprint) in 2009 – will actually rise to $1.8 billion for 2010 and 2011. In addition, the Obama administration now plans to invest upwards of a billion dollars in constructing a massive embassy in Islamabad and other diplomatic facilities in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Here, too, there will be a massive influx of “diplomats,” and here, too, a U.S. command center for the region is clearly being created.
What’s striking are the continuities in American foreign and military policy, no matter who is in the White House. The first-term Obama foreign policy now looks increasingly like the second-term Bush foreign policy. Even where change can be spotted, it regularly seems to follow in the same vein. The New York Times, for instance, recently reported that the controversial “missile defense shield” the Bush administration was insistent on basing in Poland and the Czech Republic is being reconsidered in a many-months-long Obama administration “review.” While this should be welcomed, the only option mentioned involved putting it elsewhere – in Turkey and somewhere in the Balkans. At stake is one of the great military-industrial boondoggles of our age. Yet cancellation is, it seems, beyond consideration in Washington.
Organizer David Swanson, founder among other things of the website AfterDowningStreet.org, was long in the forefront of those calling for the impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney – and now for bringing them to trial. He gives the term “activist” a good name, and he’s a prodigious, energetic, thoughtful writer as well. If you’re as struck by today’s piece as I was, you should consider giving his new book, Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union, published on this very day, a careful look. He’s special. Tom
Bush’s Third Term?
You’re living it
Authors: David Swanson
David Swanson is the author of the new book Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union (Seven Stories Press, 2009). He holds a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia and served as press secretary for Kucinich for President in 2004. Swanson is just beginning a book tour of 48 cities and hopes to see you on the road.
It sounds like the plot for the latest summer horror movie. Imagine, for a moment, that George W. Bush had been allowed a third term as president, had run and had won or stolen it, and that we were all now living (and dying) through it. With the Democrats in control of Congress but Bush still in the Oval Office, the media would certainly be talking endlessly about a mandate for bipartisanship and the importance of taking into account the concerns of Republicans. Can’t you just picture it?
There’s Dubya now, still rewriting laws via signing statements. Still creating and destroying laws with executive orders. And still violating laws at his whim. Imagine Bush continuing his policy of extraordinary rendition, sending prisoners off to other countries with grim interrogation reputations to be held and tortured. I can even picture him formalizing his policy of preventive detention, sprucing it up with some “due process” even as he permanently removes habeas corpus from our culture.
I picture this demonic president still swearing he doesn’t torture, still insisting that he wants to close Guantanamo, but assuring his subordinates that the commander-in-chief has the power to torture “if needed,” and maintaining a prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan that makes Guantanamo look like summer camp. I can imagine him continuing to keep secret his warrantless spying programs while protecting the corporations and government officials involved.
If Bush were in his third term, we would already have seen him propose, yet again, the largest military budget in the history of the world. We might well have seen him pretend he was including war funding in the standard budget, and then claim that one final supplemental war budget was still needed, immediately after which he would surely announce that yet another war supplemental bill would be needed down the road. And of course, he would have held onto his secretary of defense from his second term, Robert Gates, to run the Pentagon, keep our ongoing wars rolling along, and oversee the better part of our public budget.
Bush would undoubtedly be following through on the agreement he signed with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for all U.S. troops to leave Iraq by the end of 2011 (except where he chose not to follow through). His generals would, in the meantime, be leaking word that the United States never intended to actually leave. He’d surely be maintaining current levels of troops in Iraq, while sending thousands more troops to Afghanistan and talking about a new “surge” there. He’d probably also be escalating the campaign he launched late in his second term to use drone aircraft to illegally and repeatedly strike into Pakistan’s tribal borderlands with Afghanistan.
If Bush were still “the decider” he’d be employing mercenaries like Blackwater and propagandists like the Rendon Group and he might even be expanding the number of private security contractors in Afghanistan. In fact, the whole executive branch would be packed with disreputable corporate executive types. You’d have somebody like John (”May I torture this one some more, please?”) Rizzo still serving, at least for a while, as general counsel at the CIA. The White House and Justice Department would be crawling with corporate cronies, people like John Brennan, Greg Craig, James Jones, and Eric Holder. Most of the top prosecutors hired at the Department of Justice for political purposes would still be on the job. And political prisoners like former Alabama governor Don Siegelman and former top Democratic donor Paul Minor would still be abandoned to their fate.
In addition, the bank bailouts Bush and his economic team initiated in his second term would still be rolling along – with a similar crowd of people running the show. Ben Bernanke, for instance, would certainly have been reappointed to run the Fed. And Bush’s third term would have guaranteed that there would be none of the monkeying around with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that the Democrats proposed or promised in their losing presidential campaign. At this point in Bush’s third term, no significant new effort would have begun to restore Katrina-decimated New Orleans either. [ Hermit : On this one we disagree. Most of non-historic New Orleans should be converted to protective swamps, parks and berms. Unless current climate trends are massively reversed, it will be flooded in the near future anyway. ]
If the Democrats in Congress attempted to pass any set of needed reforms like, to take an example, new healthcare legislation, Bush, the third termer, would have held secret meetings in the White House with insurance and drug company executives to devise a means to turn such proposals to their advantage. And he would have refused to release the visitor logs so that the American public would have no way of knowing just whom he’d been talking to.
During Bush’s second term, some of the lowest-ranking torturers from Abu Ghraib were prosecuted as bad apples, while those officials responsible for the policies that led to Abu Ghraib remained untouched. If the public continued to push for justice for torturers during the early months of Bush’s third term, he would certainly have gone with another bad-apple approach, perhaps targeting only low-ranking CIA interrogators and CIA contractors for prosecution. Bush would undoubtedly have decreed that any higher-ups would not be touched, that we should now be looking forward, not backward. And he would thereby have cemented in place the power of presidents to grant immunity for crimes they themselves authorized.
If Bush were in his third term, some of his first and second term secrets might, by now, have been forced out into the open by lawsuits, but what Americans actually read wouldn’t be significantly worse than what we’d already known. What documents saw the light of day would surely have had large portions of their pages redacted, and the vast bulk of documentation that might prove threatening would remain hidden from the public eye. Bush’s lawyers would be fighting in court, with ever grander claims of executive power, to keep his wrongdoing out of sight.
Now, here’s the funny part. This dark fantasy of a third Bush term is also an accurate portrait of Obama’s first term to date. In following Bush, Obama was given the opportunity either to restore the rule of law and the balance of powers or to firmly establish in place what were otherwise aberrant abuses of power. Thus far, President Obama has, in all the areas mentioned above, chosen the latter course. Everything described, from the continuation of crimes to the efforts to hide them away, from the corruption of corporate power to the assertion of the executive power to legislate, is Obama’s presidency in its first seven months.
Which doesn’t mean there aren’t differences in the two moments. For one thing, Democrats have now joined Republicans in approving expanded presidential powers and even – in the case of wars, military strikes, lawless detention and rendition, warrantless spying, and the obstruction of justice – presidential crimes. In addition, in the new Democratic era of goodwill, peace and justice movements have been strikingly defunded and, in some cases, even shut down. Many progressive groups now, in fact, take their signals from the president and his team, rather than bringing the public’s demands to his doorstep.
If we really were in Bush’s third term, people would be far more active and outraged. There would already be a major push to really end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan. Undoubtedly, the Democrats still wouldn’t impeach Bush, especially since they’d be able to vote him out before his fourth term, and surely four more years of him wouldn’t make all that much difference.
|
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
|
|
|
|
Logged
