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Topic: Obama - Put to the test fails dismally. (Read 9344 times) |
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Re:Obama - Put to the test fails dismally.
« Reply #60 on: 2009-09-16 12:52:58 » |
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Obama Seeks PATRIOT Act Extensions
Justice Department Calls for Extension of All Three Expiring Provisions
Source: Antiwar.com
Authors: Jason Ditz
Dated: 2009-09-15
Despite promises during the campaign that he would review certain of the most intrusive portions of the PATRIOT Act, President Barack Obama's Justice Department today is calling for Congress to extend all three expiring provisions, though they were "willing to consider" civil rights protections "as long as they don't weaken" the president's powers under the act.
Among those provisions the administration is seeking to extend is the infamous Section 215: the provision which allows law enforcement access to library and bookstore records, without probable cause, for "national security" reasons. The American Library Association has been complaining for years that the provision was overbroad and many fear it could prove to have a chilling effect on the ability to read potentially subversive literature.
Another of the provisions the administration wants extended is the so-called "lone wolf" provision, which amends the FISA definition of "agent of a foreign power" to include people the government can't establish as having any link to a foreign government or terrorist organization.
Finally they would extend the "roving wiretap" provision in Section 206, which allows the government to wiretap a person and all devices they come into contact with, rather than having to get a warrant to wiretap a given phone or device.
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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
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Hermit
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Re:Obama - Put to the test fails dismally.
« Reply #61 on: 2009-09-22 09:40:40 » |
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Federal Shield Law Faces Justice Department Complaints
Officials Fear Law Could 'Threaten National Security'
Source: Antiwar.com
Authors: Jason Ditz
Dated: 2009-09-21
Basically since President Obama took office, the prospect for a Federal Shield Law protecting journalists and whistleblowers has seemed like virtually a sure thing. President Obama has come out in favor of it, and Attorney General Eric Holder expressed support for “the concept of such a law.”
But now it seems that the bill is being stalled in the Senate, chiefly as a result of vigorous campaigning by Holder’s Justice Department, which is cautioning that any effort to include a “balancing test,” forcing judges to consider the publics right to know information, would be a “threat to national security.”
Senators seem to be warming up to the idea of weakening the bill, with Sen. Feinstein (D-CA) fretting about the “constant drumbeat” of leaks and the possibility that the shield law will make it more difficult to prosecute leakers. Which is, of course, the whole point of having such a law to begin with.
Several media outlets have come out in favor of the law, but it seems like more and more delays are inevitable. In the end it is just another example of then-Senator Obama’s campaign pledges of openness falling victim to now-President Obama’s desire to keep the powers and secrecy claimed by the Bush Administration as intact as possible.
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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
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Hermit
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Re:Obama - Put to the test fails dismally.
« Reply #62 on: 2009-09-25 09:54:57 » |
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Human Rights Lawyer on Bagram Prison - 'The Obama Administration Has Completely Failed'
Source: Der Spiegel On-line
Authors: Interview conducted by John Goetz
Dated: 2009-09-21
Human rights lawyer Tina Foster talks to SPIEGEL about detainee abuses in the US military prison in Bagram, Afghanistan and her disappointment with the Obama administration.
SPIEGEL: Right after taking office, US President Barack Obama announced his plan to close Guantanamo. It looked like he would reverse the human rights policies of the Bush administration. Will the detainees the US military prison in Bagram, Afghanistan now be given legal rights?
Foster: Unfortunately, the US government did not change its position on Bagram when Obama took office. The government still claims that our clients are not entitled to any legal protections under US law. It maintains that even those individuals who they brought to Bagram from other countries, and have held without charge for more than six years, are still not entitled to speak with their attorney, and they are arguing now that they are not entitled to have their cases heard in US courts.
SPIEGEL: But there has been an important legal decision stating that detainees in Bagram have the right to legal representation.
Foster: The April 2 decision of Judge John D. Bates, a George Bush appointee, was that our clients were entitled to have their cases reviewed by the court. That was a huge success.
SPIEGEL: Is the Obama administration complying with the Bates decision in providing each detainee a representative?
Foster: Before we could present any evidence or proceed in their cases, the Obama administration appealed the decision to the court of appeals, and is now arguing that it should be overturned. The announcement was intended to generate a positive media spin on the "new" procedures at Bagram, which were announced at this time because the government's filing in the court of appeals was due the following day. If you look at the actual procedures, you will see that the detainees will not be given any legal representation. Instead, the Department of Defense is saying that it will send non-lawyer "representatives" to question the detainees and look into their cases. Those individuals are not officers of the court, and have no duty of confidentiality or loyalty to the detainee.
SPIEGEL: But what then is the difference between the Bush and Obama administrations?
Foster: There is absolutely no difference between the Bush administration and the Obama administration's position with respect to Bagram detainees' rights. They have made much ado about nothing, in the hope that the courts and the public will not examine the issue more closely.
SPIEGEL: Is it true that the human rights situation has gotten much better at Bagram in the last 18 months?
Foster: Some of our clients have been at Bagram since its early days, and they still are not being told what the charges are against them, or given the ability to challenge those allegations in any fair legal proceeding. Moreover, several of our clients were brought to Bagram from outside of Afghanistan. For example, Amin Al Bakri -- a Yemeni gem trader who was kidnapped while on a business trip in Thailand, rendered to secret prisons, tortured and finally ended up at Bagram -- is still being held incommunicado and without access to his attorneys. We believe he was tortured in CIA secret prisons before being transferred to Bagram, which is why I believe the government does not want to allow us to speak with him. It's a cover up. Amin has been at Bagram for more than six years. It's hard to imagine any other reason why the government would not allow him a simple hearing in a US court.
SPIEGEL: What about the case of Jawed Ahmad, which received a certain amount of media coverage?
Foster: Our client Jawed "Jojo" Ahmad was a young journalist working for the Canadian television network CTV. He was also taken into custody by the military and held without charge for more than a year before the US government finally released him. This all happened in 2007-2008 -- in other words, fairly recently. That "mistake" by the US government cost Jojo his life. We were eventually able to convince the US government that he was innocent, and happily he was released. Jojo committed his time after he got out of prison to exposing other injustices at Bagram and beyond in Afghanistan. He helped us with the cases of other innocent people who are currently being held at Bagram, and was essentially our star witness in this litigation. This was all cut short earlier this year, when Jojo was shot and killed in broad daylight. His assassins have never been identified. It was one of the most terrible moments of my life. He was a great person and a friend.
SPIEGEL: Can you compare the human rights situation in Bagram with that in Guantanamo?
Foster: What most people don't realize is that Bagram has always been far worse than Guantanamo. One thing that has not been stressed enough in media accounts regarding Guantanamo is that much of the abuse that the Guantanamo prisoners suffered actually happened at Bagram. Many of our former clients were subjected to sexual humiliation and assault akin to Abu Ghraib-style torture. In terms of torture and abuse, Bagram has a far worse history than Guantanamo. There are at least two detainees who died there after being tortured by US interrogators. One of them was strung up by interrogators by his wrists, and then beaten until his legs were "pulpified," according to the military's own autopsy report. Our clients who have been released more recently report exposure to extreme temperatures, sleep deprivation, prolonged isolation and other torture that is still ongoing. Bagram has always been a torture chamber -- there is no way that the United States will ever be able to rid it of that reputation unless it discontinues the practice of holding detainees incommunicado and in secret.
SPIEGEL: Major General Douglas M. Stone, who was charged to investigate Bagram, has been quoting as saying that many of the detainees in Bagram are innocent.
Foster: I think General Stone's report confirms what we have learned over the years from our clients -- most of the people at Bagram are being imprisoned unjustly. General Stone reviewed the military's own records and determined that, of the 600 current detainees at Bagram, there are 400 innocent people that the US government should not be detaining. It's obvious that the procedures that the military is using to determine who to imprison and who to release are completely flawed. What is completely baffling is why these 400 innocent individuals have not been released. It doesn't make sense to hold innocent people in our custody -- it's completely counterproductive and undermines the entire war effort.
SPIEGEL: You worked on the Obama campaign last year. Do you regret that now?
Foster: I voted and campaigned for Obama, like all the other folks here in the US who wanted to see this country recover from the illegal and unjust policies of the Bush administration. When I heard Obama's announcement to close Guantanamo, I breathed a sigh of relief that perhaps this extremely ugly chapter of American history was finally being put to an end. Unfortunately, since then, the Obama administration has completely failed in delivering the change that was promised. For a time, we believed that perhaps it would just take the new administration time to shift its policies. The reality is that the Bush and the Obama administrations have the same position on the rights of detainees in Bagram.
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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
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Hermit
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Re:Obama - Put to the test fails dismally.
« Reply #63 on: 2009-10-05 12:57:27 » |
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Gore Vidal: ‘We’ll have a dictatorship soon in the US’
The grand old man of letters Gore Vidal claims America is ‘rotting away’ — and don’t expect Barack Obama to save it
Source: The Times
Authors: Tim Teeman
Dated: 2009-09-30
A conversation with Gore Vidal unfolds at his pace. He answers questions imperiously, occasionally playfully, with a piercing, lethal dryness. He is 83 and in a wheelchair (a result of hypothermia suffered in the war, his left knee is made of titanium). But he can walk (“Of course I can”) and after a recent performance of Mother Courage at London’s National Theatre he stood to deliver an anti-war speech to the audience.
How was his friend Fiona Shaw in the title role? “Very good.” Where did they meet? Silence. The US? “Well, it wasn’t Russia.” What’s he writing at the moment? “It’s a little boring to talk about. Most writers seem to do little else but talk about themselves and their work, in majestic terms.” He means self-glorifying? “You’ve stumbled on the phrase,” he says, regally enough. “Continue to use it.”
Vidal is sitting in the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair, where he has been coming to stay for 60 years. He is wearing a brown suit jacket, brown jumper, tracksuit bottoms; his white hair twirled into a Tintin-esque quiff and with his hooded eyes, delicate yet craggy features and arch expression, he looks like Quentin Crisp, but accessorised with a low, lugubrious growl rather than camp lisp.
He points to an apartment opposite the hotel where Churchill stayed during the Second World War, as Downing Street was “getting hammered by the Nazis. The crowds would cheer him from the street, he knew great PR.”
In a flash, this memory reminds you of the swathe of history Vidal has experienced with great intimacy: he was friends with JFK, fought in the war, his father Gene, an Olympic decathlete and aeronautics teacher, founded TWA among other airlines and had a relationship with Amelia Earhart. (Vidal first flew and landed a plane when he was 10.) He was a screenwriter for MGM in the dying days of the studio system, toyed with being a politician, he has written 24 novels and is hailed as one of the world’s greatest essayists.
He has crossed every boundary, I say. “Crashed many barriers,” he corrects me.
Last year he famously switched allegiance from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama during the Democratic nomination process for president. Now, he reveals, he regrets his change of heart. How’s Obama doing? “Dreadfully. I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time. But he’s inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He’s acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism.”
America should leave Afghanistan, he says. “We’ve failed in every other aspect of our effort of conquering the Middle East or whatever you want to call it.” The “War on Terror” was “made up”, Vidal says. “The whole thing was PR, just like ‘weapons of mass destruction’. It has wrecked the airline business, which my father founded in the 1930s. He’d be cutting his wrists. Now when you fly you’re both scared to death and bored to death, a most disagreeable combination.”
His voice strengthens. “One thing I have hated all my life are LIARS [he says that with bristling anger] and I live in a nation of them. It was not always the case. I don’t demand honour, that can be lies too. I don’t say there was a golden age, but there was an age of general intelligence. We had a watchdog, the media.” The media is too supine? “Would that it was. They’re busy preparing us for an Iranian war.” He retains some optimism about Obama “because he doesn’t lie. We know the fool from Arizona [as he calls John McCain] is a liar. We never got the real story of how McCain crashed his plane [in 1967 near Hanoi, North Vietnam] and was held captive.”
Vidal originally became pro-Obama because he grew up in “a black city” (meaning Washington), as well as being impressed by Obama’s intelligence. “But he believes the generals. Even Bush knew the way to win a general was to give him another star. Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative’ you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They’re not, they’re fascists.”
Another notable Obama mis-step has been on healthcare reform. “He f***ed it up. I don’t know how because the country wanted it. We’ll never see it happen.” As for his wider vision: “Maybe he doesn’t have one, not to imply he is a fraud. He loves quoting Lincoln and there’s a great Lincoln quote from a letter he wrote to one of his generals in the South after the Civil War. ‘I am President of the United States. I have full overall power and never forget it, because I will exercise it’. That’s what Obama needs — a bit of Lincoln’s chill.” Has he met Obama? “No,” he says quietly, “I’ve had my time with presidents.” Vidal raises his fingers to signify a gun and mutters: “Bang bang.” He is referring to the possibility of Obama being assassinated. “Just a mysterious lone gunman lurking in the shadows of the capital,” he says in a wry, dreamy way.
Vidal now believes, as he did originally, Clinton would be the better president. “Hillary knows more about the world and what to do with the generals. History has proven when the girls get involved, they’re good at it. Elizabeth I knew Raleigh would be a good man to give a ship to.”The Republicans will win the next election, Vidal believes; though for him there is little difference between the parties. “Remember the coup d’etat of 2000 when the Supreme Court fixed the selection, not election, of the stupidest man in the country, Mr Bush.” [ Hermit : I think he is wrong about Hilary. She is less intelligent and more owned, particularly by the Zionist Lobby. ]
Vidal says forcefully that he wished he’d never moved back to the US to live in Hollywood, from his clifftop home in Ravello, Italy, in 2000. His partner of 53 years, Howard Austen, who died in 2003, collated a lifetime’s-span of pictures of Vidal, for a new book out this autumn, Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History’s Glare (an oddly clunky title). The cover shows what a beautiful young man Vidal was, although his stare is as hawkish as it is today.
He observes presidential office-holders balefully. “The only one I knew well was Kennedy, but he didn’t impress me as a good president. It’s like asking, ‘What do I think of my brother?’ It’s complicated. I’d known him all my life and I liked him to the end, but he wrecked his chances with the Bay of Pigs and Suez crises, and because everyone was so keen to elect Bobby once Jack had gone, lies started to be told about him — that he was the greatest and the King of Camelot.”
Today religious mania has infected the political bloodstream and America has become corrosively isolationist, he says. “Ask an American what they know about Sweden and they’d say ‘They live well but they’re all alcoholics’. In fact a Scandinavian system could have benefited us many times over.” Instead, America has “no intellectual class” and is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush.”
Vidal adds menacingly: “Don’t ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren’t any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I’m never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect it.”
While materially comfortable, Vidal’s was not a happy childhood. Of his actress and socialite mother Nina, he says: “Give her a glass of vodka and she was as tame as could be. Growing up is going to be difficult if the one person you hate is your mother. I felt trapped. I was close to my grandparents and my father was a saint.” His parents’ many remarriages means that even today he hasn’t met all his step-siblings.
He wrote his first novel, Williwaw, at 19. In 1948, he was blacklisted by the media after writing The City and the Pillar, one of the earliest novels to deal graphically with homosexual desire. “You’ll be amazed to know it is still going strong,” he says. The “JT” it is dedicated to is James “Jimmy” Trimble, Vidal’s first love and, he once said, the love of his life. “That was a slight exaggeration. I said it because there wasn’t any other. In the new book there are wonderful pictures of him from our schooldays. He was a great athlete.” Here his voice softens, and he looks emotional, briefly. “We were both abandoned in our dormitory at St Alban’s [boarding school]. He was killed at the Battle of Iwo Jima [in 1945] because of bad G2 [intelligence].”
Vidal says Trimble’s death didn’t affect him. “No, I was in danger of dying too. A dead man can’t grieve a dead man.” Has love been important to him? “Don’t make the error that schoolteacher idiots make by thinking that gay men’s relationships are like heterosexual ones. They’re not.” He “wouldn’t begin to comment” on how they are different.
In 1956 he was hired by MGM, collaborated on the screenplay for Ben Hur and continued to write novels, most notoriously Myra Breckenridge about a transsexual. It is his satires, essays and memoirs — Live From Golgotha, Palimpsest and most recently, Point to Point Navigation — which have fully rounded our vision of this thorny contrarian, whose originality springs simply, and naturally, from having deliberately unfixed allegiances and an enduring belief in an American republic and railing sadness at how that ideal has been corrupted.
Vidal became a supportive correspondent of Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 killing 168 people. The huge loss of life, indeed McVeigh’s act of mass murder, goes unmentioned by Vidal. “He was a true patriot, a Constitution man,” Vidal claims. “And I was torn, my grandfather [the Democrat Senator Thomas Gore] had bought Oklahoma into the Union.” McVeigh claimed he had done it as a protest against tyrannical government. The writer Edmund White took the correspondence as the basis for a play, Terre Haute (the jail McVeigh was incarcerated in before he was executed in 2001), imagining an encounter between the bomber and Vidal charged with desire.
“He’s a filthy, low writer,” Vidal says of White. “He likes to attack his betters, which means he has a big field to go after.” Had he wanted to meet McVeigh? “I am not in the business of meeting people,” Vidal says. “That play implies I am madly in love with McVeigh. I looked at his [White’s] writing and all he writes about is being a fag and how it’s the greatest thing on Earth. He thinks I’m another queen and I’m not. I’m more interested in the Constitution and McVeigh than the loving tryst he saw. It was vulgar fag-ism.”
Vidal says that he hates labels and has said he believes in homosexual acts rather than homosexual people. He claims his relationship with Austen was platonic (though they reputedly met at a legendary New York bath-house). He was once quoted as saying that he’d had sex with a 1,000 men by the time he was 25. It must have been a little strange for Austen, Vidal’s life companion, to source those pictures of Trimble, his first, perhaps only, love.
Vidal puts on a scornful, campy voice. “People ask [of he and Austen], ‘How did you live together so long?’ The only rule was no sex. They can’t believe that. That was when I realised I was dealing with a public too stupid by half. They can’t tell the difference between ‘The Sun rose in the East’ and ‘The Sun is made of yeast’.” Was sex important to Vidal? “It must have been yes.”
He is single now. “I’m not into partnerships,” he says dismissively. I don’t even know what it means.” He “couldn’t care less” about gay marriage. “Does anyone care what Americans think? They’re the worst-educated people in the First World. They don’t have any thoughts, they have emotional responses, which good advertisers know how to provoke.” You could have been the first gay president, I say. “No, I would have married and had nine children,” he replies quickly and seriously. “I don’t believe in these exclusive terms.”
Impaired mobility doesn’t bother him — he “rose like a miracle” on stage at the National — and he doesn’t dwell on mortality either. “Either you accept there is such a thing or you’re so dumb that you can’t grasp it.” Is he in good health? “No, of course not. I’m diabetic. It’s odd, I’ve never been fat and I don’t like candy, which most Americans are hooked on.”
There is a trace of thwarted ambition about him. “I would have liked to have been president, but I never had the money. I was a friend of the throne. The only time I envied Jack was when Joe [Kennedy, JFK’s father] was buying him his Senate seat, then the presidency. He didn’t know how lucky he was. Here’s a story I’ve never told. In 1960, after he had spent so much on the presidential campaign, Joe took all nine children to Palm Beach to lecture them. He was really angry. He said, ‘All you read about the Kennedy fortune is untrue. It’s non-existent. We’ve spent so much getting Jack elected and not one of you is living within your income’. They all sat there, shame-faced. Jack was whistling. He used to tap his teeth: they were big teeth, like a xylophone. Joe turned to Jack and he says, ‘Mr President, what’s the solution?’ Jack said, ‘The solution is simple. You all gotta work harder’.” Vidal guffaws heartily.
Hollywood living proved less fun. “If there was a social whirl, you can be sure I would not be part of it.” He does a fabulous impression of Katharine Hepburn complaining about playing the matriarch in Suddenly Last Summer, which he wrote. “I hate this script,” he recalls Hepburn saying . “I’m far too healthy a person to know people like this.” Vidal snorts. “She had Parkinson’s. She shook like a leper in the wind.”
I ask what he wants to do next. “My usual answer to ‘What am I proudest of?’ is my novels, but really I am most proud that, despite enormous temptation, I have never killed anybody and you don’t know how tempted I have been.”
That wasn’t my question, I say. “Well, given that I’m proudest that I haven’t killed anybody, I might be saving something up for someone.” A perfect line: we both laugh.
Is he happy? “What a question,” he sighs and then smiles mischievously. “I’ll respond with a quote from Aeschylus: ‘Call no man happy till he is dead’.”
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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
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Hermit
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Re:Obama - Put to the test fails dismally.
« Reply #64 on: 2009-10-17 19:18:36 » |
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A historian's account of Democrats and Bush-era war crimes
Source: Salon.com
Authors: Glenn Greenwald
Dated: 2009-10-08
The author was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of two New York Times Bestselling books: "How Would a Patriot Act?" (May, 2006), a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, and "A Tragic Legacy" (June, 2007), which examines the Bush legacy. In his most recent book, "Great American Hypocrites", released in April, 2008, by Random House/Crown, he examined the manipulative electoral tactics used by the GOP and propagated by the establishment press. [ Hermit : Minor editing by me]
The American Propsect's Adam Serwer notes that, yesterday, Sen. Joe Lieberman successfully inserted into the Homeland Security appropriations bill an amendment -- supported by the Obama White House -- to provide an exemption from the Freedom of Information Act's mandates by authorizing the Defense Secretary to suppress long-concealed photographs of detainee abuse. Two courts had ruled -- unanimously -- that the American people have the right to see these photographs under FOIA, a 40-year-old law championed by the Democrats in the LBJ era and long considered a crowning jewel in their legislative achievements. But this Lieberman amendment, which is now likely to pass, undermines all of that and -- as EBay founder Pierre Omidyar put it today -- its central purpose is to "legalize suppression" of evidence of American war crimes.
What made those detainee photographs so important from the start is that they depict brutal abuse well outside of the Abu Ghraib facility and thus reveal to Americans -- and the world -- that America's torture was not, as they've been constantly told, limited to rogue sadists at Abu Ghraib and the waterboarding of three bad guys. Instead, our torture regime was systematic, pervasive, brutal, fatal, and -- because it was the by-product of conscious policies set at the highest levels of government -- common across America's "War on Terror" detention regime. These photographs would have documented those vital facts; combated the false denials from torture apologists; fueled the momentum for accountability; and revealed, in graphic and unavoidable terms, what was truly done by America's government. But a Democrat-led Congress, at the urging of a Democratic President, is now taking extraordinary steps -- including a new law which has no purpose other than to suppress evidence of America's war crimes -- to ensure that this evidence never sees the light of day.
If a historian were to write about the events of the first nine months of 2009 when it came to transparency issues as they relate to the war crimes of the Bush years, the following is what would be written. Just remember this was all done with an overwhelming Democratic majority in both houses of Congress and a Democratic President elected on a promise to usher in "an unprecedented level of openness in Government" and "a new era of openness in our country." There's no blaming Republicans for any of this:
In February, the Obama DOJ went to court to block victims of rendition and torture from having a day in court, adopting in full the Bush argument that whatever was done to the victims is a "state secret" and national security would be harmed if the case proceeded. The following week, the Obama DOJ invoked the same "secrecy" argument to insist that victims of illegal warrantless eavesdropping must be barred from a day in court, and when the Obama administration lost that argument, they engaged in a series of extraordinary manuevers to avoid complying with the court's order that the case proceed, to the point where the GOP-appointed federal judge threatened the Government with sanctions for noncompliance. Two weeks later, "the Obama administration, siding with former President George W. Bush, [tried] to kill a lawsuit that seeks to recover what could be millions of missing White House e-mails."
In April, the Obama DOJ, in order to demand dismissal of a lawsuit brought against Bush officials for illegal spying on Americans, not only invoked the Bush/Cheney "state secrets" theory, but also invented a brand new "sovereign immunity" claim to insist Bush officials are immune from consequences for illegal domestic spying. The same month -- in the case brought by torture victims -- an appeals court ruled against the Obama DOJ on its "secrecy" claims, yet the administration vowed to keep appealing to prevent any judicial review of the interrogation program. In responses to these abuses, a handful of Democratic legislators re-introduced Bush-era legislation to restrict the President from asserting "state secrets" claims to dismiss lawsuits, but it stalled in Congress all year. At the end of April and then again in August, the administration did respond to a FOIA lawsuit seeking the release of torture documents by releasing some of those documents, emphasizing that they had no choice in light of clear legal requirements.
In May, after the British High Court ruled that a torture victim had the right to obtain evidence in the possession of British intelligence agencies documeting the CIA's abuse of him, the Obama administration threatened that it would cut off intelligence-sharing with Britain if the court revealed those facts, causing the court to conceal them. Also in May, Obama announced he had changed his mind and would fight-- rather than comply with -- two separate, unanimous court orders compelling the disclosure of Bush-era torture photos, and weeks later, vowed he would do anything (including issue an Executive Order or support a new FISA exemption) to prevent disclosure of those photos in the event he lost yet again, this time in the Supreme Court. In June, the administration "objected to the release of certain Bush-era documents that detail the videotaped interrogations of CIA detainees at secret prisons, arguing to a federal judge that doing so would endanger national security." In August, Obama Attorney General Eric Holder announced that while some rogue torturers may be subject to prosecution, any Bush officials who relied on Bush DOJ torture memos in "good faith" will "be protected from legal jeopardy." And all year long, the Obama DOJ fought (unsuccessfully) to keep encaged at Guantanamo a man whom Bush officials had tortured while knowing he was innocent.
That's the record which an historian, wedded as faithfully as possible to a narration of indisputable facts, would be compelled to write. And those are just disclosure and transparency issues relating to Bush-era crimes. None of that has anything to do with ongoing assertion of detention powers, habeas corpus denials, renditions, transparency issues generally, the Democrats' active efforts just this week to prevent abuses of the Patriot Act and FISA, etc. (for those with Twitter, just read Marcy Wheeler's infuriating account from the last two hours of how key Democrats in the Senate -- led by Dianne Feinstein and Pat Leahy -- just gutted virtually every effort to rein in Patriot Act and FISA abuses that were sponsored by Feingold, Durbin and even Arlen Specter: NAJIBULLAH ZAZI!!!). And now this war on transparency is all culminating with a White House-backed effort -- spearheaded by key ally Joe Lieberman -- to sweep aside two federal court rulings and to write a new exemption for FOIA that has no purpose but to prevent the world from seeing new and critical evidence of systematic American war crimes. If the stated goal of Democrats had been to use their newfound control of Government to protect and suppress Bush-era war crimes, how could they have done any better?
UPDATE: When I interviewed House Rules Committee Chairwoman Louise Slaughter back in June, she vowed to do everything possible to stop the Lieberman/Graham/Obama photo suppression amendment, arguing that FOIA was every bit "as sacred to Democrats as Social Security and Medicare." If only that were true. Back in June, Slaughter -- with the help of an intense campaign from blogs and civil libertarians -- did succeed in blocking its enactment, but as Mother Jones' Nick Baumann reports, the legislative mechanism used by Lieberman this week virtually assures its passage, even though Slaughter vows still to oppose it.
Two other related notes: (1) a journalist emails me to remind that I should add to Obama's anti-transparency crusade the White House's efforts to water down the "journalist shield law" to the point where it would easily enable the Government to compel disclosure of the identity of whistle-blowers in the national security context (i.e., the kind who told Dana Priest about CIA black sites and Eric Lichtblau about illegal NSA eavesdropping) -- a clear violation of Obama's campaign platform that was engineered by the White House in secret rather than out in the open; and (2) I wasn't able to watch the Patriot Act proceedings today, but -- in addition to Wheeler's linked descriptions above -- the normally rhetorically restrained Adam Serwer just wrote of the Senate Democrats' bill: "Senate passes PATRIOT Act Reauthorization. They should name it after J. Edgar Hoover."
UPDATE II: Quite related to all of this: The Nation's Chris Hayes today examines how many liberal advocacy groups allow themselves to be controlled by the White House and subject themselves to collective message coordinating. As Hayes notes, Jane Hamsher refers to these controlled progressive groups as the "veal pen," which she expertly described here. There are many reasons why the reaction to things such as what I describe in today's post from progressive groups (as distinct from the very vocal civil liberties groups) has been so muted and acquiescent -- e.g., a tribal refusal to criticize one's own, a gut belief that someone as good and just as Barack Obama couldn't possibly really be continuing Bush/Cheney policies and complicitly helping to suppress their war crimes, the anger that one provokes from one's own "allies" with such criticism, etc. -- but the organized co-option process which Hayes and Hamsher document, accompanied by the fear of losing access and funding, is a very significant factor.
UPDATE III: Russ Feingold just wrote a scathing condemnation of the behavior of his Senate Democratic colleagues and, especially, the Obama administration[/url] with regard to what they just did with the Patriot Act and FISA renewals, including this:I am also very troubled that administration officials have been taking positions behind closed doors that they are not taking publicly. . . [I]f the administration wanted to further water down the already limited reforms in the bill that was on the table, they should have said so openly. Instead, at our only public hearing we were told that the Justice Department did not have positions on the crucial issues about to be discussed. Then, over the past week, in classified settings, the Department has weighed in against even some of the limited reforms that Sen. Leahy originally proposed. The administration loves to posture in public as though they support various reforms -- to lead their wild-eyed supporters to believe they do -- only to work in secret to gut those same reforms. Feingold adds that "[a]t the beginning of the year, I had high hopes for the Patriot Act reauthorization process." Why? Just because of small facts like these:We had just elected a President with a strong civil liberties record in the Senate. His Attorney General had supported some reforms during consideration of the last reauthorization bill in 2005. And Democrats controlled the Senate by such a large margin that our advantage on the Judiciary Committee ended up at 12-7 after Sen. Specter switched parties. Despite all of that, Feingold ended up having to vote against the new Patriot Act bill that he spent all year leading because it was diluted to the point where very little was fixed and some things were actually made worse. When it comes to transparency and civil liberties, that's what the Democratic Congress and White House are. If the record I documented here isn't enough to see that, then take it from someone who sees them up close and personal every day.
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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
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Hermit
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Re:Obama - Put to the test fails dismally.
« Reply #65 on: 2009-10-29 04:32:56 » |
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U.S. APPEALS COURT AGREES TO REHEAR RENDITION LAWSUIT AGAINST SAN JOSE AVIATION FIRM
Source: Localwire.com
Authors: Not Credited
Dated: 2009-10-27
A federal appeals court in San Francisco agreed today to reconsider a ruling that allowed five men who claim they were tortured in overseas prisons to sue a San Jose aviation company.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted a request by the Obama Administration for a rehearing on the government's claim that the lawsuit against Jeppesen DataPlan Inc. should be dismissed.
Jeppesen, a subsidiary of Boeing Co., is an aviation services company.
The five men, all foreign citizens, claim the company violated international human rights law by aiding the CIA in plane flights that took them in 2001, 2002 and 2003 to overseas sites where they were allegedly tortured while being interrogated.
The alleged CIA program to transport terrorism suspects to other countries for interrogation is known as extraordinary rendition. The lawsuit claims Jeppesen provided flight plans and other aviation support. [ Hermit : Whatever the program is, the vast preponderance of evidence for it proves that "alleged" it is not. ]
The Obama Administration has continued a Bush Administration claim that the lawsuit concerns so-called state secrets and allowing it to proceed "would pose an unacceptable risk to national security."
A federal trial judge in San Jose agreed with that argument and dismissed the lawsuit last year.
But in April, a three-judge panel of the appeals court reinstated the lawsuit, saying that the government could seek secrecy for specific evidence but could not seek dismissal of the entire case.
In today's action, the circuit court announced that the case will be reheard by an 11-judge panel. No date has been set for a hearing.
American Civil Liberties Union attorney Ben Wizner, a lawyer for the five men, said in a statement, "We are disappointed by the court's decision to rehear this case, but we hope and expect that the court's historic decision to allow the lawsuit to go forward will stand."
Wizner alleged, "The CIA's rendition and torture program simply is not a 'state secret.'''
"In fact," Wizner said, "since the court's decision in April, the government's sweeping secrecy claims have only gotten weaker, with the declassification of additional documents describing the CIA's detention and interrogation practices."
The circuit court's use of an 11-judge panel to review a decision of a three-judge panel is known as en banc review and is generally reserved for cases of great legal importance.
The court holds an average of about 20 en banc hearings per year, among the 13,000 appeals it receives annually from federal trial courts in nine western states.
The five plaintiffs are citizens of Ethiopia, Egypt, Italy, Iraq and Yemen. They say they were kidnapped in various locations including Pakistan and then sent on Jeppesen-supported CIA flights to Egypt, Morocco and Afghanistan, where they were allegedly tortured either by foreign security forces or in CIA-run prisons.
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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
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Hermit
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Re:Obama - Put to the test fails dismally.
« Reply #66 on: 2009-11-07 23:56:21 » |
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The Evil Empire
Source: Antiwar.com
Source: Paul Craig Roberts
Source: 2009-11-07
[ Paul Craig Roberts wrote the Kemp-Roth bill and was assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was associate editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and contributing editor of National Review. He is author or co-author of eight books, including The Supply-Side Revolution (Harvard University Press). He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon chair in political economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and senior research fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He has contributed to numerous scholarly journals and testified before Congress on 30 occasions. He has been awarded the U.S. Treasury's Meritorious Service Award and the French Legion of Honor. He was a reviewer for the Journal of Political Economy under editor Robert Mundell. ]
The US government is now so totally under the thumbs of organized interest groups that "our" government can no longer respond to the concerns of the American people who elect the president and the members of the House and Senate. Voters will vent their frustrations over their impotence on the president, which implies a future of one-term presidents. Soon our presidents will be as ineffective as Roman emperors in the final days of that empire.
Obama is already set on the course to a one-term presidency. He promised change, but has delivered none. His health care bill is held hostage by the private insurance companies seeking greater profits. The most likely outcome will be cuts in Medicare and Medicaid in order to help fund wars that enrich the military/security complex and the many companies created by privatizing services that the military once provided for itself at far lower costs. It would be interesting to know the percentage of the $700+ billion "defense" spending that goes to private companies. In American "capitalism," an amazing amount of taxpayers’ earnings go to private firms via the government. Yet, Republicans scream about "socializing" health care.
Republicans and Democrats saw opportunities to create new sources of campaign contributions by privatizing as many military functions as possible. There are now a large number of private companies that have never made a dollar in the market, feeding instead at the public trough that drains taxpayers of dollars while loading Americans with debt service obligations.
Obama inherited an excellent opportunity to bring US soldiers home from the Bush regime’s illegal wars of aggression. In its final days, the Bush regime realized that it could "win" in Iraq by putting the Sunni insurgents on the US military payroll. Once Bush had 80,000 insurgents collecting US military pay, violence, although still high, dropped in half. All Obama had to do was to declare victory and bring our boys home, thanking Bush for winning the war. It would have shut up the Republicans.
But this sensible course would have impaired the profits and share prices of those firms that comprise the military/security complex. So instead of doing what Obama said he would do and what the voters elected him to do, Obama restarted the war in Afghanistan and launched a new one in Pakistan. Soon Obama was echoing Bush and Cheney’s threats to attack Iran.
In place of health care for Americans, there will be more profits for private insurance companies.
In place of peace there will be more war.
Voters are already recognizing the writing on the wall and are falling away from Obama and the Democrats. Independents who gave Obama his comfortable victory have now swung against him, recently electing Republican governors in New Jersey and Virginia to succeed Democrats. This is a protest vote, not a confidence vote in Republicans.
Obama’s credibility is shot. And so is Congress’s, assuming it ever had any. The US House of Representatives has just voted to show the entire world that the US House of Representatives is nothing but the servile, venal, puppet of the Israel Lobby. The House of Representatives of the American "superpower" did the bidding of its master, AIPAC, and voted 344 to 36 to condemn the Goldstone Report.
In case you don’t know, the Goldstone Report is the Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict. The "Gaza Conflict" is the Israeli military attack on the Gaza ghetto, where 1.5 million dispossessed Palestinians, whose lands, villages, and homes were stolen by Israel, are housed. The attack was on civilians and civilian infrastructure. It was without any doubt a war crime under the Nuremberg standard that the US established in order to execute Nazis.
Goldstone is not only a very distinguished Jewish jurist who has given his life to bringing people to accountability for their crimes against humanity, but also a Zionist. However, the Israelis have demonized him as a "self-hating Jew" because he wrote the truth instead of Israeli propaganda.
US Representative Dennis Kucinich, who is now without a doubt a marked man on AIPAC’s political extermination list, asked the House if the members had any realization of the shame that the vote condemning Goldstone would bring on the House and the US government. The entire rest of the world accepts the Goldstone report.
The House answered with its lopsided vote that the rest of the world doesn’t count as it doesn’t give campaign contributions to members of Congress.
This shameful, servile act of "the world’s greatest democracy" occurred the very week that a court in Italy convicted 23 US CIA officers for kidnapping a person in Italy. The CIA agents are now considered "fugitives from justice" in Italy, and indeed they are.
The kidnapped person was renditioned to the American puppet state of Egypt, where the victim was held for years and repeatedly tortured. The case against him was so absurd that even an Egyptian judge order his release.
One of the convicted CIA operatives, Sabrina deSousa, an attractive young woman, says that the US broke the law by kidnapping a person and sending him to another country to be tortured in order to manufacture another "terrorist" in order to keep the terrorist hoax going at home. Without the terrorist hoax, America’s wars for special interest reasons would become transparent even to Fox "News" junkies.
Ms. deSousa says that "everything I did was approved back in Washington," yet the government, which continually berates us to "support the troops," did nothing to protect her when she carried out the Bush regime’s illegal orders.
Clearly, this means that the crime that Bush, Cheney, the Pentagon, and the CIA ordered is too heinous and beyond the pale to be justified, even by memos from the despicable John Yoo and the Republican Federalist Society.
Ms. deSousa is clearly worried about herself. But where is her concern for the innocent person that she sent into an Egyptian hell to be tortured until death or admission of being a terrorist? The remorse deSousa expresses is only for herself. She did her evil government’s bidding and her evil government that she so faithfully served turned its back on her. She has no remorse for the evil she committed against an innocent person.
Perhaps deSousa and her 22 colleagues grew up on video games. It was great fun to plot to kidnap a real person and fly him on a CIA plane to Egypt. Was it like a fisherman catching a fish or a deer hunter killing a beautiful 8-point buck? Clearly, they got their jollies at the expense of their renditioned victim.
The finding of the Italian court, and keep in mind that Italy is a bought-and-paid-for US puppet state, indicates that even our bought puppets are finding the US too much to stomach.
Moving from the tip of the iceberg down, we have Ambassador Craig Murray, rector of the University of Dundee and until 2004 the UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, which he describes as a Stalinist totalitarian state courted and supported by the Americans.
As ambassador, Murray saw the MI5 intelligence reports from the CIA that described the most horrible torture procedures. "People were raped with broken bottles, children were tortured in front of their parents until they [the parents] signed a confession, people were boiled alive."
"Intelligence" from these torture sessions was passed on by the CIA to MI5 and to Washington as proof of the vast al Qaeda conspiracy.
Amb. Murray reports that the people delivered by CIA flights to Uzbekistan’s torture prisons "were told to confess to membership in Al Qaeda. They were told to confess they’d been in training camps in Afghanistan. They were told to confess they had met Osama bin Laden in person. And the CIA intelligence constantly echoed these themes."
"I was absolutely stunned," says the British ambassador, who thought that he served a moral country that, along with its American ally, had moral integrity. The great Anglo-American bastion of democracy and human rights, the homes of the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, the great moral democracies that defeated Nazism and stood up to Stalin’s gulags, were prepared to commit any crime in order to maximize profits.
Amb. Murray learned too much and was fired when he vomited it all up. He saw the documents that proved that the motivation for US and UK military aggression in Afghanistan had to do with the natural gas deposits in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The Americans wanted a pipeline that bypassed Russia and Iran and went through Afghanistan. To insure this, an invasion was necessary. The idiot American public could be told that the invasion was necessary because of 9/11 and to save them from "terrorism," and the utter fools would believe the lie.
"If you look at the deployment of US forces in Afghanistan, as against other NATO country forces in Afghanistan, you’ll see that undoubtedly the US forces are positioned to guard the pipeline route. It’s what it’s about. It’s about money, its about energy, it’s not about democracy."
Guess who the consultant was who arranged with then Texas governor George W. Bush the agreements that would give to Enron the rights to Uzbekistan’s and Turkmenistan’s natural gas deposits and to Unocal to develop the trans-Afghanistan pipeline. It was Karzai, the US-imposed "president" of Afghanistan, who has no support in the country except for American bayonets.
Amb. Murray was dismissed from the UK Foreign Service for his revelations. No doubt on orders from Washington to our British puppet.
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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
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Hermit
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Re:Obama - Put to the test fails dismally.
« Reply #67 on: 2009-11-11 12:20:17 » |
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A Year With Obama – and US Foreign Relations Have Only Worsened
Source: Tribune Media Services, Inc.
Authors: William Pfaff
Dated: 2009-11-11
Who would have thought a year ago that most of the issues of conflict in America’s foreign relations would be made worse during the first year following Barack Obama’s election as U.S. president?
Even those disputes or differences that were appeased or quiet a year ago are now worse. On Iraq, the new president has faithfully followed the policy of George W. Bush, and now Iraq threatens breakdown.
Mr. Obama ran on a promise to fight the "right war" in Afghanistan. This policy rests upon the monumental assumption that victory can be found in a military campaign meant to alter the character of Central Asian political and religious society so as to remake it in the American image – as Condoleezza Rice defined what a year ago was the Bush administration’s policy, and is now the apparent Obama policy.
In the time-honored bureaucratic fashion, the president’s military advisers have offered him three troop options: one impossibly high, one suicidally small, and one – the one they actually want – in between, and "just right."(In poker games, this is known as "forcing" the card onto the patsy.) The troops are already on the move. It will be some time before we see them again.
Put aside, for a moment, this military disaster that is now in the course of manufacture in the "AfPak" theater of unwinnable wars.
Look at the president’s other policy problems. The Korean affair continues, as we have just seen. There are tensions foreseeable in his visit to a new Japanese government at the end of this week. The old security conventions and connivances of past Japanese Liberal Democrat governments will be questioned.
Japan’s new government’s geopolitical view of East Asian security is not the passive and compliant one displayed for nearly 60 years by Liberal Democrat politicians that did as was suggested in Washington. In question today is the legal status under which 47,000 U.S. troops and a series of bases have quasi-permanently occupied the archipelago since 1945. Japanese naval forces were limited in number and mission, despite China’s rising military power. [ Hermit : As I observed before GW Bush adopted a policy pushing Japan towards militarizing, this is the inevitable consequence of that action ] .
China is developing a blue-water navy to support territorial claims in the region, while experiencing serious trade tensions with the U.S. On Nov. 5, the U.S. imposed 99 percent anti-dumping taxes on certain Chinese steel exports. Then there is the question of the American trade deficit with China, which suits the U.S. but not China, and the troublesome shadowing of the dollar by the Chinese renminbi.
In Latin America, the Obama people have already made trouble, demanding and getting a sizable new airbase agreement in Colombia, whose significance, as the U.S. Air Force itself says, will be strategic. (Presumably to counter the "menace" of Russian ships off Venezuela.) Washington’s ambiguous conduct with respect to the Honduras military coup did not contribute to good Pan-American relations.
The president’s winning personality, his appeals for mutual understanding, and his promotion of negotiations over threats have all created good will for him and for the United States. But every active step he has taken on the large issues of the Middle East and Central Asia has angered, alienated, or devastatingly disappointed those internationally, and in the United States, who expected the most from him.
He began his term with a program for finding the long-sought Arab-Israeli solution. To disappointment-hardened observers of the 40-year (and continuing) shipwreck of Palestinian-Israeli relations, the Obama plan seemed to err on the side of optimism, but if seriously applied, conceivably could work.
The international auspices were favorable. So was the domestic American situation: The stranglehold on U.S. Jewish opinion held until now by the settler lobby and the Likud-dominated American Israel Public Affairs Committee seemed weakened. Liberal Jewish voters – the vast majority – were sympathetic to change; the liberal J Street lobby had been formed.
The new president had a plan for mutual concessions: application of the long-promised ("roadmap") freeze on Israeli settlement construction on Palestine land, and a fresh Palestine start on security negotiations.
The plan proved a bad joke. Israel defied President Obama. The president, after preliminary talk more forceful than ever before heard, peremptorily capitulated, accepting Israeli terms. The president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, then announced he won’t run for a second term in upcoming elections, the logical consequence of which is that the Palestinian people will be left a people under total military occupation, the Israel government responsible for their condition, their livelihoods, their well-being, their fate.
Some think this will inspire the Israeli people to invite the Palestinians to become voting citizens. Some think it could inspire Israel to annex all of Palestine and force all of its present Arab occupants out of Palestine, over the borders into Egypt or Jordan.
There may be possibilities in between these extremes. One hopes President Obama will think of something.
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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
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Blunderov
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Re:Obama - Put to the test fails dismally.
« Reply #68 on: 2009-11-12 01:12:10 » |
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Quote from: Hermit on 2009-11-11 14:59:15
Those claiming or suggesting "another win for al Q'aeda" in Fort Hood...
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[Blunderov] I'm not aware of who might be making such claims. But if they happen to simultaneously be supporters of the various wars being waged at the moment, they will need to explain why the supposed objective - "fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here" - has apparently not been achieved. To the contrary in fact. I suppose the chickenhawks are now likely to claim that it would have been worse without these wars.
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Fritz
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Re:Obama - Put to the test fails dismally.
« Reply #69 on: 2009-11-12 13:38:05 » |
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I don't visualize the al Qaeda connection on first plush, at all, when this story broke. I figured a "Shrink" lost it (no surprise for me there). So I was even more surprised to see the discussion you guys embark on (as always great stuff).
Will we really get the truth or will this be spun at any time to fulfill what ever need the administration has visa vi Afghanistan and Iraq by the "Infants and Cake eaters" and both sides of this mass killing aka WAR.
Sigh
Fritz
The Hasan Case: Overt Clues and Tactical Challenges
Source: STRATFOR
Author: Scott Stewart and Fred Burton
Date: 2009.11.11
In last week’s global security and intelligence report, we discussed the recent call by the leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Nasir al-Wahayshi, for jihadists to conduct simple attacks against a variety of targets in the Muslim world and the West. We also noted how it is relatively simple to conduct such attacks against soft targets using improvised explosive devices, guns or even knives and clubs.
The next day, a lone gunman, U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, opened fire on a group of soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas. The victims were in the Soldier Readiness Processing Center, a facility on the base where troops are prepared for deployment and where they take care of certain processing tasks such as completing insurance paperwork and receiving medical examinations and vaccinations.
Even though the targets of Hasan’s attack were soldiers, they represented a very soft target in this environment. Most soldiers on bases inside the United States are normally not armed and are only provided weapons for training. The only personnel who regularly carry weapons are the military police and the base civilian police officers. In addition to being unarmed, the soldiers at the center were closely packed together in the facility as they waited to proceed from station to station. The unarmed, densely packed mass of people allowed Hasan to kill 13 (12 soldiers and one civilian employee of the center) and wound 42 others when he opened fire.
Hasan is a U.S.-born Muslim who, according to STRATFOR sources and media accounts, has had past contact with jihadists, including the radical Imam Anwar al-Awlaki. Al-Awlaki is a U.S.-born imam who espouses a jihadist ideology and who was discussed at some length in the 9/11 commission report for his links to 9/11 hijackers Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. Al-Awlaki, who is currently living in Yemen and reportedly has contacts with al Qaeda, posted a message on his Web site Nov. 9 praising Hasan’s actions. Despite Hasan’s connections to al-Awlaki and other jihadists, it is unknown at this point if he was even aware of al-Wahayshi’s recent message calling for simple attacks, and therefore it is impossible to tell if his attack was in response to it.
However, one thing that is certain is that investigators examining Hasan’s computer hard drive, e-mail traffic and Internet history will be looking into that possibility, along with other indications that Hasan was linked to radicals.
We noted last week that by their very nature, individual actors and small cells are very difficult for the government to detect. They must somehow identify themselves by contacting a government informant or another person who reports them to the authorities, attend a militant training camp or conduct correspondence with a person or organization under government scrutiny. In the Hasan case, it now appears that Hasan did self-identify by making radical statements to people he worked with, who reported him to the authorities. It also appears that he had correspondence with people such as al-Awlaki, whom the government was monitoring. Because of this behavior, Hasan brought himself to the attention of the Department of Defense, the FBI and the CIA.
The fact that Hasan was able to commit this attack after bringing government attention to himself could be due to a number of factors. Chief among them is the fact that it is tactically impossible for a government to identify every aspiring militant actor and to pre-empt every act of violence. The degree of difficulty is increased greatly if an actor does indeed act alone and does not give any overt clues through his actions or his communications of his intent to attack. Because of this, the Hasan case provides an excellent opportunity to examine national security investigations and their utility and limitations.
The Nature of Intelligence Investigations
The FBI will typically open up an intelligence investigation (usually referred to as a national security investigation) in any case where there is an indication or allegation that a person is involved in terrorist activity but there is no evidence that a specific law has been broken. Many times these investigations are opened up due to a lead passed by the CIA, National Security Agency or a foreign liaison intelligence service. Other times an FBI investigation can come as a spin-off from another FBI counterterrorism investigation already under way or be prompted by a piece of information collected by an FBI informant or even by a tip from a concerned citizen — like the flight instructors who alerted the FBI to the suspicious behavior of some foreign flight students prior to the 9/11 attacks. In such a case, the FBI case agent in charge of the investigation will open a preliminary inquiry, which gives the agent a limited window of time to look into the matter. If no indication of criminal activity is found, the preliminary inquiry must be closed unless the agent receives authorization from the special agent in charge of his division and FBI headquarters to extend it.
If, during the preliminary inquiry, the investigating agents find probable cause that a crime has been committed, the FBI will open a full-fledged criminal investigation into the case, similar to what we saw in the case of Luqman Ameen Abdullah and his followers in Detroit.
One of the large problems in national security investigations is separating the wheat from the chaff. Many leads are based on erroneous information or a misidentification of the suspect — there is a huge issue associated with the confusion caused by the transliteration of Arabic names and the fact that there are many people bearing the same names. Jihadists also have the tendency to use multiple names and identities. And there are many cases in which people will falsely report a person to the FBI out of malice. Because of these factors, national security investigations proceed slowly and usually do not involve much (if any) contact with the suspect and his close associates. If the suspect is a real militant planning a terrorist attack, investigators do not want to tip him off, and if he is innocent, they do not want to sully his reputation by showing up and overtly interviewing everyone he knows. Due to its controversial history of domestic intelligence activities, the FBI has become acutely aware of its responsibility to protect privacy rights and civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution and other laws.
And the rights guaranteed under the Constitution do complicate these national security investigations. It is not illegal for someone to say that Muslims should attack U.S. troops due to their operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, or that more Muslims should conduct attacks like the June 1 shooting at a recruiting center in Little Rock, Ark. — things that Hasan is reported to have said. Radical statements and convictions are not illegal — although they certainly would appear to be conduct unbecoming a U.S. Army officer. (We will leave to others the discussion of the difficulties in dealing with problem officers who are minorities and doctors and who owe several years of service in return for their education.)
There are also many officers and enlisted soldiers in the U.S. Army who own personal weapons and who use them for self-defense, target shooting or hunting. There is nothing extraordinary or illegal about a U.S. Army major owning personal weapons. With no articulable violation of U.S. law, the FBI would have very little to act upon in a case like Hasan’s. Instead, even if they found cause to extend their preliminary inquiry, they would be pretty much limited to monitoring his activities (and perhaps his communications, with a court order) and waiting for a law to be violated. In the Hasan case, it would appear that the FBI did not find probable cause that a law had been violated before he opened fire at Fort Hood. Although perhaps if the FBI had been watching his activities closely and with an eye toward “the how” of terrorist attacks, they might have noticed him conducting preoperational surveillance of the readiness center and even a dry run of the attack.
Of course, in addition to just looking for violations of the law, the other main thrust of a national security investigation is to determine whom the suspect is connected to and whom he is talking to or planning with. In past cases, such investigations have uncovered networks of jihadist actors working together in the United States, Canada, Europe and elsewhere. However, if all Hasan did in his correspondence with people such as al-Awlaki was exercise his First Amendment right to hold radical convictions, and if he did not engage in any type of conspiracy to conduct an attack, he did not break the law.
Another issue that complicates national security cases is that they are almost always classified at the secret level or above. This is understandable, considering they are often opened based upon intelligence produced by sensitive intelligence programs. However, this classification means that only those people with the proper clearance and an established need to know can be briefed on the case. It is not at all unusual for the FBI to visit a high-ranking official at another agency to brief the official on the fact that the FBI is conducting a classified national security investigation involving a person working for the official’s agency. The rub is that they will frequently tell the official that he or she is not at liberty to share details of the investigation with other individuals in the agency because they do not have a clear need to know. The FBI agent will also usually ask the person briefed not to take any action against the target of the investigation, so that the investigation is not compromised. While some people will disagree with the FBI’s determination of who really needs to know about the investigation and go on to brief a wider audience, many officials are cowed by the FBI and sit on the information.
Of course, the size of an organization is also a factor in the dissemination of information. The Department of Defense and the U.S. Army are large organizations, and it is possible that officials at the Pentagon or the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command (still known by its old acronym CID) headquarters at Fort Belvoir, Va., were briefed on the case and that local officials at Fort Hood were not. The Associated Press is now reporting that the FBI had alerted a Defense Criminal Investigative Service agent assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) in Washington about Hasan’s contacts with al-Awlaki, and ABC reports that the Defense Department is denying the FBI notified them. It would appear that the finger-pointing and bureaucratic blame-shifting normally associated with such cases has begun.
Even more severe problems would have plagued the dissemination of information from the CIA to local commanders and CID officers at Fort Hood. Despite the intelligence reforms put in place after the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government still faces large obstacles when it comes to sharing intelligence information with law enforcement personnel.
Criminal Acts vs. Terrorism
So far, the Hasan shooting investigation is being run by the Army CID, and the FBI has been noticeably — and uncharacteristically — absent from the scene. As the premier law enforcement agency in the United States, the FBI will often assume authority over investigations where there is even a hint of terrorism. Since 9/11, the number of FBI/JTTF offices across the country has been dramatically increased, and the JTTFs are specifically charged with investigating cases that may involve terrorism. Therefore, we find the FBI’s absence in this case to be quite out of the ordinary.
However, with Hasan being a member of the armed forces, the victims being soldiers or army civilian employees and the incident occurring at Fort Hood, the case would seem to fall squarely under the mantle of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). From a prosecutorial perspective, a homicide trial under the UCMJ should be very tidy and could be quickly concluded. It will not involve all the potential loose ends that could pop up in a federal terrorism trial, especially when those loose ends involve what the FBI and CIA knew about Hasan, when they learned it and who they told. Also, politically, there are some who would like to see the Hasan case remain a criminal matter rather than a case of terrorism. Following the shooting death of Luqman Ameen Abdullah and considering the delicate relationship between Muslim advocacy groups and the U.S. government, some people would rather see Hasan portrayed as a mentally disturbed criminal than as an ideologically driven lone wolf.
Despite the CID taking the lead in prosecuting the case, the classified national security investigation by the CIA and FBI into Hasan and his possible connections to jihadist elements is undoubtedly continuing. Senior members of the government will certainly demand to know if Hasan had any confederates, if he was part of a bigger plot and if there are more attacks to come. Several congressmen and senators are also calling for hearings into the case, and if such hearings occur, they will certainly produce an abundance of interesting information pertaining to Hasan and the national security investigation of his activities.
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Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains -anon-
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Fritz
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Re:Obama - Put to the test fails dismally.
« Reply #70 on: 2009-11-12 13:44:23 » |
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[Fritz] WHAT ?
Chia Obama Handmade Planter
https://www.chiaobama.com/flare/next
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Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains -anon-
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MoEnzyme
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infidel lab animal
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Re:Obama - Put to the test fails dismally.
« Reply #71 on: 2009-11-13 02:10:46 » |
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Hermit et al,
I'm starting a new thread on Major Nidal Malik Hasan so as to not distract from Hermit's catalog of Obama's "dismal failures" and to perhaps catch more readers who would like to discuss last weeks Ft. Hood event involving the treachery of Major Nidal Malik Hasan. I'll be keeping an eye on both threads of course, but I'll be responding to the Ft. Hood shooting subject on the other thread if anybody shows interest in it.
http://www.churchofvirus.org/bbs/index.php?board=69;action=display;threadid=43158
love,
-Mo
ps. okay, Hermit and I are coordinating so here comes my wrecking ball. I'm going to delete my Hasan posts on this this thread, so I'm leaving this for blunderov and fritz's attention, so you can delete yours as well Leaving us with Fritz's chia Obama as the last relevant post on this thread, and we can continue over there. If there are any problems with the big paste I did on the other thread, let me know and I'll try to pretty it up as necessary. This message will disappear when the move is complete.
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I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
(consolidation of handles: Jake Sapiens; memelab; logicnazi; Loki; Every1Hz; and Shadow)
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MoEnzyme
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Re:Obama - Put to the test fails dismally.
« Reply #72 on: 2009-11-13 03:05:50 » |
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Quote from: Fritz on 2009-11-12 13:44:23
This is definitely going on my birthday wishlist. Thanks Fritz. 
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I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
(consolidation of handles: Jake Sapiens; memelab; logicnazi; Loki; Every1Hz; and Shadow)
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MoEnzyme
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Re:Obama - Put to the test fails dismally.
« Reply #73 on: 2009-11-14 00:29:49 » |
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In order to put this thread back on topic . . . I think Hermit makes or draws attention to many legitimate criticisms of Obama, which is at least part of the reason I'm not wanting to spoil his thread here. My only real beef is with the subject line, that this all adds up to Obama being a "dismal failure." Its Hermit's however and I really wouldn't change it either even as I disagree because it serves as a suitable memetic magnet for criticism - both thoughtful and otherwise, but criticism regardless and I think there should be a place for that.
I agree that Obama often doesn't measure up to my own hopes for a great transitional leader, but in terms of simply a competent politician I think he's fine and perhaps that in the USA we've forgotten how necessary such a thing can be - perhaps a small but definitely essential blessing we need to find our way back to civilization. Something like lawyers . . . yes we can safely despise them, but in some places in the world (Pakistan comes to mind) they are essentially the only thing left saving them from unchecked collective insanity. So this is my defense of lawyers and politicians . . . in the US we have obviously proven that we can do much worse than Obama. With that in mind, please carry on.
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I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
(consolidation of handles: Jake Sapiens; memelab; logicnazi; Loki; Every1Hz; and Shadow)
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Hermit
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Re:Obama - Put to the test fails dismally.
« Reply #74 on: 2009-11-15 00:32:59 » |
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Secretary Gates signs order barring release of torture photos
Source: Rawstory.com
Authors: Stephen C. Webster
Dated: 2009-11-14
Pursuant to new powers delegated to him by Congress, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has executed an order blocking the release of photos depicting the torture of detainees. In doing so, it becomes highly unlikely that the Supreme Court will further consider making the photos public, as a lower court had ordered.
In a new supplemental brief [PDF link] filed with the high court, the administration's attorneys argue that the new law Congress passed to allow Gates this authority effectively exempts the photos from the Freedom of Information Act, therefore invalidating an earlier lawsuit.
"It now seems likely that today's action will put an end to the issue, making it unnecessary for the court to hear the case," MSNBC reported.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which sought the photos' release, had urged Secretary Gates to release the photos. In an open letter [PDF link], the ACLU said the images must be seen because they show the "pervasiveness" of abuse across Iraq and Afghanistan and that it was "aberrational."
"The government has previously asserted that disclosing these photographs poses risks in part because it is a 'particularly critical time' in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan," ACLU attorneys Jameel Jaffer and Alexander A. Abdo noted at the letter's conclusion. "We accordingly ask that you review any decision to withhold any photographs every ninety days to account for changing circumstances."
"In order to withhold the photos, Gates simply had to certify, as he did in the court filing, that 'public disclosure of these photographs would endanger citizens of the United States, members of the United States Armed Forces, or employees of the United States Government deployed outside the United States,'" Mother Jones reporter Nick Baumann noted. "In other words, their release had to endanger someone, somewhere. And in the unlikely event that Gates had to stretch the truth to make that certification, it wouldn't matter, since there's no provision in the law that allows any court to review Gates' determination or rule on whether it was truthful."
In a release condemning the president's signature of the law allowing Gates to block the photos, Jaffer continued: "Secretary Gates should be guided by the importance of transparency to the democratic process, the extraordinary importance of these photos to the ongoing debate about the treatment of prisoners and the likelihood that the suppression of these photos would ultimately be far more damaging to national security than their disclosure. The last administration's decision to endorse torture undermined the United States' moral authority and compromised its security. A failure to fully confront the abuses of the last administration will only compound these harms."
The Supreme Court is expected to react by Monday.
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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
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